Beyond Living the Dream: Psychosocial Dimensions of Working in a Modern Aquarium
by
Jennifer O. Reynolds
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communication
Royal Roads University Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Supervisor: Dr. Renee Lertzman September, 2018
Jennifer O. Reynolds, 2018 BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 2
COMMITTEE APPROVAL
The members of Jennifer Reynolds’ Thesis Committee certify that they have read the thesis titled Beyond Living the Dream: Psychosocial Dimensions of Working in a Modern Aquarium and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communications:
Dr. Renee Lertzman [signature on file]
Dr. Richard Kool [signature on file]
Final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon submission of the final copy of the thesis to Royal Roads University. The thesis supervisor confirms to have read this thesis and recommends that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements:
Dr. Renee Lertzman [signature on file]
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 3
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BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 4
Abstract
This research explores the psychosocial dimensions of a poorly understood profession: the professional aquarist (fish caretaker) in a modern aquarium. Using a qualitative and psychoanalytically-informed methodology, this study explored how aquarists at the Vancouver
Aquarium navigate and negotiate any tensions, dilemmas and stressors they experience in their work, including public scrutiny of their occupation, the stressors and traumas inherent in caretaking work and the political, social and organizational challenges specific to the Vancouver
Aquarium. Through interviews with five professional aquarists using the Dialogic, Relational
Interview method, a thematic analysis illuminates the complexity of the work, including sources of resilience and the forms of defensiveness such as defense mechanisms and coping strategies the aquarists appeared to employ to stay functional. Findings suggest that aquarists experience moral distress regularly throughout the course of their work, often leading to feelings of ambivalence and guilt, and increasing the occupational risk of burnout.
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Table of Contents Abstract ...... 4
Acknowledgments ...... 8
Prologue ...... 9
Chapter 1: That Dream Job? It’s Complicated ...... 12 Emotional Highs and Lows ...... 13 Why Understand the Experience of Aquarists? ...... 15
Interlude: My First Aquarium ...... 21
Chapter 2: A New Perspective on Being a Professional Aquarist ...... 23 Life Support: Aquarists as Piscine Nurses ...... 23 Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and Professional Quality of Life ...... 25 Caring for the Environment can be Stressful...... 28 Aquariums: Connection, Conservation, and Controversy...... 29 Beyond the Visitor Experience ...... 30 Anxiety, Psychic Pain, and Defensiveness ...... 32 Summary: The Aquarist Experience is Unique and Worthy of Study ...... 35
Interlude: The Finer Points of Euthanasia by Hammer ...... 37
Chapter 3: Research Methodology ...... 39 Research Questions ...... 39 A Psychoanalytically-informed Research Approach ...... 40 The defended subject...... 41 The dialogic, relational interview...... 42 Data Collection ...... 44 The interview process...... 44 Researcher and participant dynamics...... 50 BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 6
Participation Selection and Ethical Considerations ...... 51 Data Analysis, Credibility, and Limitations ...... 53 Credibility...... 55 Reflexivity...... 57
Interlude: The Female Stingray ...... 59
Chapter 4: The Experience of Professional Aquarists ...... 63 The Participants ...... 64 A Framework for Investigating the Experience of the Aquarists ...... 66 The Cost of Caring ...... 68 The Aquarium’s romantic charm...... 69 Passion for the work as resilience...... 71 The honeymoon is over...... 74 “You’re the bulwark against failure”: the weight of responsibility...... 80 “It’s just non-stop deaths that you’ve been a part of”: The Aquarists’ Everyday Trauma 89 Accidents, mistakes, and near misses...... 91 “Don’t name the fish, it’s the kiss of death”: the regular pulse of fish loss...... 103 Moral distress and guilt in the aquarist work experience...... 109 Chronic Stressors and their Relationship to Burnout ...... 118 “World class, my ass”...... 119 Hypocrisy leads to a loss of trust and pride...... 122 “It’s almost like the aquarists don’t exist anymore”: Aquarists’ perception that the organization is forgetting its roots...... 130 “Empty the tanks”: the Aquarium’s protestors and detractors...... 135 Analysis Summary ...... 145
Chapter 5: Discussion, Recommendations and Conclusion ...... 150 Reducing Burnout Risk ...... 150 BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 7
Recommendations ...... 151 Implications, Limitations and Future Directions ...... 153 Academic Contributions ...... 155 Reflections ...... 157
References ...... 159
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Acknowledgments
This thesis is dedicated to my grandfather, James Judd, who, along with my parents, extensively facilitated and supported my interest in tropical fish and my dream of working at the
Vancouver Aquarium. Few young women growing up in chilly, rural eastern Ontario would manage to indulge and cultivate such an exotic fascination despite not having access to any public aquarium. Instead, my parents tolerated five aquariums bubbling in their basement
(acquired over a series of family Christmases), and frequent trips to the pet store to replenish fish and supplies.
I also wish to thank my supervisor Dr. Renee Lertzman for her patient direction as I initially struggled to hone in on what, amongst all the intriguing angles of the zoo and aquarium industry, I wanted to use this thesis to understand. Her clear-eyed and empathetic supervision allowed me to balance exploring an emotionally challenging topic while maintaining academic rigour. Committee member Dr. Rick Kool was always available and offered enthusiastic logistical support and cheerful encouragement whenever I needed it.
Finally, I wish to thank my partner, JB Bell, for his remarkable patience and stoic support as this thesis subsumed both our lives for the period I was struggling with it and working on it.
His engagement and interest in writing and editing helped me navigate periods of feeling overwhelmed and buried by the minutiae demanded by a project such as this. I surely could not have done this nearly as well without him.
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Prologue
I’m behind the large, stainless steel sinks, with their decrepit faucets and the perfectly effective 2 x 4 nail rack for hanging tools of the trade.
The tools?
Nets—invariably with an ill-sized hole you found out about at exactly the wrong time—and of all sizes. I’d shoved a length of vinyl tubing over the metal handle of one such net: all the better to avoid being shocked by the massive electric eel that net will carry.
Safety goggles—usually scratched and possibly decorated with random pieces of driftwood that had been pressure-washed into orbit. Maybe some splotches of mould.
Containers of fish food; usually tucked away in the fridge, but sometimes out and holding other objects. Twist-ties, zap straps, bits of monofilament fishing line, old impellor parts, large fish scales, ant traps, tags, elastics, microworm cultures…
Gurgling away, and in its safe and alive sounding hum behind me—the section: TFW. Tropical Freshwater. Tall Spathiphyllum 1 plants had extended their roots into the electric eel’s tank. The piranhas, next over, with a plank around their tank for access. The jewel tanks, the flooded forest, and then, the abundant behind- the-scenes holding/reserve aquaria. Tanks 1-5. Lungfish! Pufferfish, knifefish, stingrays, cichlids, rainbowfish, pond turtles, discus, oh, the catfish. My heart swells to think of it. To let it wander back to that magical place, that magical time.
I would re-live my first year at the Vancouver Aquarium into eternity.
Groundhog year. Before the place itself starts to get to you. It was utterly perfect.
1 Most folks call these plants “Peace lilies,” but aquarium biologists like their scientific names, and so that’s how I knew them. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 10
I climbed up the ladder to the Giant Fishes exhibit with my boss, Lee, and he introduced me to another of my tasks: feeding the Giant Fishes exhibit. As I slipped thawed lake smelt under the sandpapery discs of the Amazonian stingrays and experienced the thunderous, space-filling clap of the jaws of an eight foot long arapaima at the surface, all I could think was, “You’re going to pay me for this?”
Fish geek Jen had arrived. Things were good! I was doing work I loved. I was truly living the dream. I’d say ‘What do you do when you already have your dream? You get damn good at it.’
This is a story about aquarists: me, and my colleagues. It’s about the dream of working with the fish at the Vancouver Aquarium, and how the reality unfolds. It’s not what I thought it would be, but it was magical. It’s not what the public thinks it is, or even what the aquarium’s senior management thinks it is, but it’s still wonderful.
This is the story of dedicated fish caretakers who do their best work in the name of the animals, day after day, despite many obstacles. It’s the story of how these aquarists negotiate the tensions and traumas woven into their work, sometimes with disconnection and frustration, yet always with surprising resiliency. It’s a story of their curiosity, devotion, and love.
Here is what it’s really like to have that Aquarium dream job, and the responsibilities and challenges of heeding one’s calling and of doing one’s duty. This is my love letter to my colleagues, to my friends, and to the fishes.
I remain honoured and grateful to have worked alongside such kind people of high integrity and good humour. The Aquarium has been an island for me, made of the passionate and BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 11
engaged aquarists I worked alongside, the animals that drew us all there, and the dream of what it could be for all of us, and for the world. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 12
Chapter 1: That Dream Job? It’s Complicated
I had a dream job for thirteen years. When people would find out what I did for work, the inevitable comment would be something along the lines of “wow, you’re living the dream!” or,
“oh, that must be amazing!” Indeed, caring for thousands of tropical fish and small animals as a
Senior Aquarium Biologist at the Vancouver Aquarium was an unforgettable experience: full of emotional highs—and lows.
I chose to research the experiential, emotional and psychosocial dimensions of working as a professional aquarist at the Vancouver Aquarium because my own such work experience left me with both many unanswered questions and numerous experiences I found difficult to process.
I wanted to better understand what lay beneath the veneer of the dream job I had so eagerly trained and enlisted for and subsequently devoted myself to.
In exploring the aquarist work experience from these perspectives, this research touches on and contributes a new context to the fields of psychosocial studies, caretaking work and human-animal relations.
In what follows, from my own experience and perspective, I illustrate some of the complex emotional dimensions, including deep meaning and significant responsibility inherent to working as a professional aquarist. We then explore the local and broader cultural context of the Aquarium as a way to understand the outside pressures that both the organization and its staff experience as they reap the fallout of significant animal deaths and the resulting shift in public opinion. We examine the curious dissonance in institutional acceptance of emotional attachment BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 13
to whales versus attachment to fish, which may contribute to those who care for fish developing forms of professional detachment that parallel those known in nursing and how this introduces psychosocial dimensions into this research.
Emotional Highs and Lows
When I first started in my career, some friends cautiously mentioned that someone they knew, upon on hearing of my new job, had immediately remarked “oh, they burn out so fast.” As a newly minted aquarist 2 at the time, I had no way to relate to that. Spending my working days in intimate proximity to thousands of exotic fishes felt simultaneously life-affirming and transcendent. The fish I cared for were thriving: they grew, and I discovered eggs, and sometimes “recruits” 3 as they reproduced. They displayed fascinating courtship, predatory, and feeding behaviours, some of which had never been observed by humans. The exhibits were a constant expression of creative energy, inspired by my studies of the natural habitats of the fishes and interest in recreating ecosystems. I hoped beautiful, naturalistic exhibits would inspire visitors to fall in love with the fish the way I had, and in turn to care for the aquatic realm. Still, the simpler, daily tasks involved with caretaking, such as gravel vacuuming or scrubbing the displays to a sparkling clean held their own deep satisfaction for me, and I never begrudged the dirty, fishy and wet nature of the work—rather, I was proud to be an aquarist.
2 I use this job title preferentially throughout this work because it’s the term the fish biologists at the Aquarium preferred for themselves, and the one best recognized within the greater public aquarium industry. Many of the aquarists I interviewed began their careers as “aquarists” but later job title switches renamed the role “Aquarium Biologist,” which many of us felt somehow did not encompass the breadth of skills and knowledge the role demands aside from ichthyological knowledge: chemistry, mechanical systems and repairs, taxonomy, behaviourism, physical agility, animal nutrition, and more. 3 “Recruits” was the term we used for baby fish who show up in the exhibit without any additional help from the aquarist, much like it might occur in their natural habitats. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 14
Throughout the course of my work at the Vancouver Aquarium, I started to better understand the warning about burnout I had received so many years ago. I experienced a number of stressors—many of which appeared to be a just “part of the job”— that regularly caused me emotional distress. Animals fell ill and died even as I felt pressure from the organization that visitors should never encounter the evidence, carefully concealing it in cups or buckets. Time and money to support the level of care that I felt the animals should be getting was often scarce.
Mechanical systems to keep the animals alive were prone to failure, requiring frequent intervention and vigilance. I questioned whether I was providing the best animal care I could and whether my skills and knowledge were adequate to the task. I was questioned at parties and gatherings about whether I felt that working in an aquarium was morally defensible.
Worst of all was finding myself in the situation of having accidentally contributed to the death of an animal in my care, a situation that, beyond the initial grief and stress, would inevitably lead me to question whether that animal should even have been there, and whether our conservation goals as an organization were achieving anything useful since animals were dying for that pursuit. Over time, several peers left their work in the animal care field and turned to new careers, at least in part because of these types of stresses.
Working as an aquarist in an accredited, conservation-oriented facility such as the
Vancouver Aquarium involves a unique and potentially stressful blend of both care work and sustainability work. These stressors may negatively affect the professional quality of life for aquarists, and they may be at risk for suffering from elements of compassion fatigue. Further, I argue that the current workplace stress management programs available to public aquarium BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 15
professionals, informed by the field of compassion fatigue, require further development with an eye to the unique work experience of aquarists. While researchers have investigated the stressors experienced by other animal care professionals such as veterinarians, veterinary technicians, animal shelter workers, their findings do not necessarily generalize onto aquarists.
Reflecting on my time as an aquarist, I felt uncertain, and I wanted to find out: Were these experiences mine alone? To answer that query, I developed this project with the following primary research questions guiding my explorations:
• What specific stressors do aquarists experience at the Vancouver Aquarium?
• How do aquarists appear to navigate or negotiate them?
These questions guided and informed this project, as I took a deep look at the experience of working as an aquarist and hope I have brought a new perspective to understanding their world.
Why Understand the Experience of Aquarists?
Animal care professionals who become disgruntled due to unrecognized emotional burdens and stress may pose a threat to the existence of their former organizations. Consider
Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film, Blackfish . The film featured interviews with several former marine mammal trainers as a foundation for its assertion that maintaining cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) in captive settings is cruel and should stop. The film had a huge impact on the organization it featured, Seaworld (Neate, 2015), to the point that
Seaworld, in 2016, agreed to end its killer whale breeding program (Allen, 2016) due to the immense public pressure it experienced. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 16
This pressure also spilled over to the Vancouver Aquarium’s cetacean collection, triggering a Vancouver Parks Board review of its operations and leading to a temporary ban on the breeding of cetaceans at the Vancouver Aquarium (CBC, 2014). In November 2016, the remaining two belugas—both of whom had lived at the Aquarium for decades—died unexpectedly, after a lengthy period of intensive veterinary care and many attempts to uncover the source of their mysterious illness (CBC, 2016). It was a difficult time for many of the staff, some of whom felt a very close connection with the whales and saw them as an icon of the organization.
The Vancouver Aquarium then conducted a five-month investigation into the cause of death of the belugas, which revealed only that it was likely an unknown toxin. In early 2017, the
Parks Board made the decision to permanently end the captivity of any cetaceans in Stanley
Park 4 after months of polarized discourse and increasing public pressure (Kane, 2017; McElroy,
2017).
Shortly thereafter, the Vancouver Aquarium’s Human Resources department recognized that the intense effort made by the animal care staff to save the beluga whales had caused major stress for the marine mammal and veterinary staff involved. They hired a consultant to deliver a workshop on compassion fatigue 5, in an attempt to support the staff through that difficult time, as the HR department had begun to recognize that caring for animals might be a source of stress in
4 The Vancouver Aquarium’s main site is in Stanley Park, and thus under the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Parks Board, from whom they lease the land the Aquarium sits on. 5 Compassion fatigue is regarded as a form of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder (Figley, 2002; Huggard & Huggard, 2008; Lloyd & Campion, 2017) and is explained in detail later in this chapter. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 17
the professional lives of their marine mammal staff and mammal trainers. Aquarists were also invited to attend as many of them, as divers, had been conscripted to aid in the intensive care the belugas needed, and they too had animal caretaking roles in the organization. I reviewed the slides of the presentation and when I later spoke to aquarists who attended, the general sentiment could be expressed with “It was nice that they put in the effort, but it didn’t quite fit for me”.
There seemed to be a sense that aquarists don’t—or, shouldn’t—become so attached to the animals under their care, in contrast to marine mammal staff who work with only a handful of individual animals and are seemingly allowed to have deeper relationships.
Further amplifying the need for exploring the emotional and experiential dimensions of working as an aquarist, my own experience has suggested that the zoo and aquarium field is dominated by a long-standing culture of minimizing or downplaying the emotional aspects of animal care work. “Bunny-hugger” is a common and derogatory term applied to zoo-keepers who “like” their animals too much, appear to be too concerned about their welfare, or react with emotional distress when faced with a suffering or dying animal (Grazian, 2015).
In the workplace culture I experienced as an aquarist at the Vancouver Aquarium, there was an informal rule that you shouldn’t name animals—to do so was referred to as “the kiss of death”. When, occasionally, the requirement for individual identification was needed to track an individual’s health, names referring to a physical feature were preferred, such as “Two Spot,” or
“Big Guy”. There is a practicality to these monikers, yet they don’t follow the naming conventions we seem to apply to pets or other animals with whom we readily form attachments BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 18
(Zilcha-Mano, Mikulincer, & Shaver, 2011). Pet names in my own household have been
“Harvey” and “Matisse,” for example.
In many cases, aquarists simply cannot track individual animals. No one could name and track a school of thousands of individual silvery herring—so, their health management was approached, appropriately, from a population perspective. However, for animals that are more individually recognizable, the “don’t-name-the-animals” taboo does seem to serve to limit a strong emotional attachment to an individual animal. Additionally, when sharing enthusiasm for a particular species, it was considered unprofessional and immature for aquarists to call them
“cute,” or “adorable,” to use gender terms when referring to them, e.g. “boys” or “girls,” or to be interacting with the fish and other animals in ways that seemed too much like one might with a personal pet (training, petting, taking extra time feeding them, or other interactions that weren’t strictly necessary for the animals’ well-being). It was considered more suitable—and, seemed a part of continuously demonstrating your aquarist mettle—to refer to them by species names, e.g.
“the Oxydoras” 6.
Menzies Lyth (1960) discussed the requirement for nurses in her landmark study to develop adequate professional detachment. She reports that emotional stress in the nursing context is likely to be met with “brisk, reassuring behaviour and advice of the ‘stiff upper lip’,
‘pull yourself together’” (p. 54). At times of emotional difficulty, such as the loss of an animal, in my own aquarium career, I was sometimes counselled by other staff members, either
6 I cared, for many years, for a personable, large, and heavily armoured Amazonian catfish with the scientific name Oxydoras niger , commonly known as the “Ripsaw catfish,” who was very gentle at taking the tiniest pieces of food from you. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 19
management or colleagues, that “it’s just a job,” and “don’t take this home with you,” in what I feel were attempts to prevent me from feeling emotional distress. Reflecting upon these experiences and their similarity to those of the nurses in Menzies Lyth’s study led me to consider psychosocial components of the work experience as important to my research. The Association for Psychosocial Studies (2018) defines psychosocial as the ways in which “subjective experience is interwoven with social life” (para. 1).
For most animal care professionals—myself included— the work represents much more than a task-list that can be shelved at the end of the work day. It is not “just a job.” Animal caretakers, simply put, love their work (Figley & Roop, 2006). I had long felt that my work was a “calling,” a concept that Bunderson and Thompson (2009) found was very common in the zookeepers they interviewed. They also found that while there were benefits to zookeepers’ viewing their work as a calling, such as meaning and purpose, a sense of calling “complicates the relationship between zookeepers and their work, fostering a sense of occupational identification, transcendent meaning, and occupational importance, on the one hand, and unbending duty, personal sacrifice, and heightened vigilance, on the other” (pp. 38-39).
My professional experience echoed much of what Bunderson and Thompson uncovered in their interviews about the complex nature of deeply meaningful work such as zoo-keeping, particularly in terms of duty, sacrifice and vigilance. Bunderson and Thompson (2009) also identified that zookeepers in their study held a fundamental tension inherent in deeply meaningful work such as zoo-keeping: that “deep meaning does not come without real responsibility” (p. 52). Animal care work does demand discipline and responsibility, but such BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 20
responsibility inflicts a burden on its bearer, however happy the bearer may be for the task.
While aquarists may seem to have a “dream job”, the reality of their caretaking work seemed not so simple to me.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 21
Interlude: My First Aquarium
My first aquarium was given to me at age 10, as a new hobby after our family moved to Deep River. I’d been reading exotic fish books that my parents had in the house before that, and I always seemed to have an affinity for them. We set the tank up in my bedroom, and I’d been reading fish magazines and the books and had decided on exactly how I was going to go about getting the fish, and how beautiful and how happy they would be. I took a lot of care in setting it up, no doubt helped by my parents. It bubbled cleanly and warmly, its yellowish glow sending comforting ripples of light, as the air pump hummed and provided some white noise.
I’d made a plan for exactly which fish I was going to get. I wanted platies.
They were an eminently sensible choice then, and I still have a soft spot for these fish today. In the fish magazines I’d been reading, I saw ads reading “Stress Coat— ask for a squirt in the bag—it will coat their scales!” So, like a good little fish geek in the making, I decided I would ask for that when I went to the fish store to get the fish.
We went on a family trip from Deep River into Pembroke. It was winter in
Northern Ontario, and cold: I had cool white beaded puffy winter coat on. I went into the fish store and selected out each male and female individual platy I wanted.
They all had their own patterns and colours and I would be able to tell them all apart. Into the bag they went. And I proudly asked the saleswoman “Could you give them a squirt of stress coat in the bag?”
“We don’t have that, but I have this stuff,” She said, holding up a yellow bottle of Aquasafe, and I said “Sure”. She dumped a generous capful in the bag, and it turned the bag water blue. That wasn’t what it looked like on the ad, but she had done it so cavalierly that it was hard to doubt her. Off I went with my precious new fish in their bag of blue-tinted water. I tucked them inside my white puffy BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 22
coat, to keep them warm, because they were tropical fish and we’d have a half hour drive to get back to Deep River, in a chilly van. So I was doing everything right so far! As I walked out of the store and to the parking lot, I felt the fish thumping in the bag. I figured they were just scared.
We were driving home, me with this bag of fish tucked into my coat, and not wanting to pull them out to look at them for fear of cooling them off. I kept feeling them thumping against my chest, irregular little darts of fishy energy. I asked my
Dad. He wasn’t sure. We kept going. When we got home, I floated the bag of fish in the aquarium. They were messed up. They weren’t swimming right. We let them out. Something was wrong! They’re not swimming right!
They died, twirling, scary deaths, clearly poisoned by the Aquasafe. It was a different product, and the dosage was too much. I’d ask for a squirt, and she’d dumped in a capful. My Dad got the store on the phone, and tried to see what they could do to help, or explain. But there wasn’t anything.
I was crushed. I remember the disappointment and sadness well. Absolutely bitter. Sick. And I had a moment of fourth-grade clarity. I thought, well, if I hadn’t been so excited about those fish, if I hadn’t loved them so much, and felt so sure it would be great, then I wouldn’t hurt so much. Then I won’t be crushed, next time.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 23
Chapter 2: A New Perspective on Being a Professional Aquarist
Aquariums and their professional aquarists exist in a multi-faceted realm. Aquarists are busily engaged in constant caretaking work, while the larger aquarium organization attempts to balance demands between daily operational needs, the financial constraints of non-profit status 7, and the evolution and growth of the organization. In the literature review that follows, I present new lenses which may be useful in better understanding the experience of professional aquarists, and the context of their work.
Life Support: Aquarists as Piscine Nurses
In an aquarium environment, all organisms are essentially on life support, requiring constant infusions of care, and careful maintenance of the life support systems 8. This differs somewhat from the work of zookeepers—whose charges readily survive on land as we do—and lends itself well to comparisons with nursing work. Menzies Lyth (1960) discussed the stresses experienced by nurses in the context of the primary task of the hospital, providing “continuous care for patients, day and night, all the year round” (p. 97). From the stresses inherent in nursing work, Menzies Lyth demonstrated how anxieties and social defense systems—the ways in which organizations develop practices and strategies for managing anxieties—arise.
Because the responsibility for continuous patient care rests with the nursing service,
Menzies Lyth (1960) claims that the nurses she investigated bore “the full, immediate and
7 Not all accredited aquariums are non-profit, but the majority of them, including the Vancouver Aquarium, do seem to retain non-profit status. 8 “Life support system” typically refers to the filtration, pumps, water additives, and temperature regulation aquatic animals require for successful maintenance in captivity. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 24
concentrated impact of stresses arising from patient care” (p. 97). While aquarists may not always be caring for injured or ill animals, the spectre of illness or death looms constantly— particularly when working with aquarium systems where a mistake or the failure of one piece of a life support system can result in mass die-offs—and the “patients” are unable to report their own symptoms.
Other similarities between nursing work and the work of an aquarist in a public aquarium can be found in comparing the hospital environment with the work environment of the aquarists– that of being “behind the scenes.” de Carvalho, Muller, de Carvalho, and de Souza Melo (2005) list risks associated with the hospital work environment including biological, physical, chemical agents, ergonomics and psychosocial risks . Psychosocial risks are defined as “those aspects of work design and the organization and management of work, and their social and organizational contexts, which have the potential for causing psychological, social or physical harm” (Leka &
Houdmont, 2010, p. 3). Indeed, many of these risks are also present in aquarists’ working spaces and working lives, as we uncover throughout this research.
Further parallels between the role of aquarists and nursing or other frontline caretaking work such as social work, veterinary or animal rescue work include the possibility of moral distress . Moral distress has been defined in multiple ways, but can be encapsulated as the experience of workers when they are unable to practice their profession according to their moral code—due to organizational or other obstacles— and the emotional burden, painful feelings and psychological disequilibrium that may result (Epstein & Hamric, 2009; Kahler, 2015; Leggett, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 25
Wasson, Sinacore, & Gamelli, 2013; Mänttäri ‐van der Kuip, 2016). Such emotional burdens have the potential to profoundly and negatively affect the work experience of aquarists.
Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and Professional Quality of Life
Human health care workers have benefitted from the great deal of attention placed on workplace and occupational stress over the years since Menzies Lyth’s study (Lloyd & Campion,
2017; Yoder, 2010). More recently, this interest in workplace and occupational stress has extended to the field of animal health care, particularly veterinary contexts. Bride (2008) notes that until Figley and Roop (2006) published “Compassion Fatigue in the Animal-Care
Community,” there was a scarcity of literature investigating the stressors associated with working in animal-care settings. The extraordinary rate of suicide in the veterinary profession
(Stoewen, 2015) prompted the veterinary sector to better prioritize understanding how to mitigate what has been called compassion fatigue .
Compassion fatigue is regarded as a form of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder
(Figley, 2002; Huggard & Huggard, 2008; Lloyd & Campion, 2017). It primarily arises from secondary trauma: “bearing witness to, and a need to relieve the suffering of others” (Lloyd &
Campion, 2017, p. 3). In the veterinary context, this includes a strong focus on bearing witness to the human clients’ suffering. Animal health care professionals are expected to demonstrate compassion and empathy for the client, who may be distressed by the failing health of their pet, the patient. Such emotionally demanding roles increase the risk that staff will experience compassion fatigue (Lloyd & Campion, 2017). Animal health care professionals may also become attached to the animal patient and experience distress when the animal patient is BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 26
suffering (Polachek & Wallace, 2018). They may also be exposed to a great deal of animal neglect and death: consider veterinary and caretaking staff in shelter environments, where euthanasia or encountering severely neglected animals is commonplace (Reeve, Rogelberg,
Spitzmüller, & Digiacomo, 2005). Handling ethical dilemmas, such as having to euthanize animals when they didn’t think it was the right thing to do, or knowing an animal should be euthanized when the family wasn’t ready, was a significant source of moral distress and a top contributor to compassion fatigue for veterinarians (Kahler, 2015).
Stamm’s Professional Quality of Life Manual (2010), which supports a widely-used scale for assessing professional quality of life in those who are in the “helping” professions 9, notes that professional quality of life is made up of two aspects: compassion satisfaction 10 and compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue is further broken down into two components: compassion fatigue, and burnout (Figley, 2002; Lloyd & Campion, 2017; Stamm, 2010). Although compassion fatigue is mainly understood to arise from secondary trauma, work-related trauma may be a combination of direct (primary) trauma and secondary trauma (Stamm, 2010).
Burnout is mainly understood as “exhaustion of physical or emotional strength” (Figley
& Roop, 2006, p. 19) and an “unintentional end point” (Lloyd & Campion, 2017, p. 2) resulting from exposure to chronic stress and frustration in the work environment (Figley & Roop, 2006;
Lloyd & Campion, 2017). Examples of workplace stressors that could put a worker at risk of
9 The Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL) is focused on measuring positive and negative effects of working with people who have experienced trauma. It holds some relevance as part of a framework for animal care professionals but is not explicit in including that field in its framework. 10 Compassion satisfaction are the rewarding and satisfying aspects of work which bolster caretakers’ resilience in processing difficult experiences associated with their work (Lloyd & Campion, 2017). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 27
experiencing burnout include long working hours, conflict at work, work overload, high-demand, low-control working environments, insufficient reward, and working in an environment with very little in the way of social support mechanisms (Angerer, 2003; Lloyd & Campion, 2017).
Moral distress is also a known contributor to burnout among nurses (Figley & Roop, 2006;
Leggett et al., 2013; Wagner, 2015). Exhaustion, frustration, cynicism, anger, feelings of inefficacy and depression can be typical of burnout (Angerer, 2003; Stamm, 2010), which may disrupt the physical and mental well-being, and thus the professional and personal lives of those afflicted (Lloyd & Campion, 2017).
As Bunderson and Thompson (2009) suggested, deeply meaningful work may be a double-edged sword. Indeed, the great responsibility borne by a caretaker can be tempered by the great rewards of the work. Polachek and Wallace (2018) studied what they called “the paradox of compassionate work”, theorizing that the field of compassion fatigue research in animal health care fields had neglected to account for compassion satisfaction. Compassion satisfaction bolsters caretakers’ resilience in processing difficult experiences associated with their work
(Lloyd & Campion, 2017). Figley and Roop (2006) define compassion satisfaction as “a sense of fulfillment or gratification from the work” (p. 13). In the veterinary and shelter contexts they studied, that meant joy from helping vulnerable animals, the improvement in health of a patient, sometimes bringing animals back to life, and satisfying desperate and subsequently grateful clients. In the aquarium context, my own experience suggests that the long-term caretaker nature of the job has its own kind of rewards. Stamm’s “Professional Quality of Life Manual” (2010) defines compassion satisfaction as “the pleasure you derive from being able to do your work BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 28
well”, and includes “You may feel positively about your colleagues or your ability to contribute to the work setting or even the greater good of society” (p. 12). Since compassion satisfaction can improve resilience in other caretaking professions, it is important to understand how aquarists might experience it. Certainly, in the best situations, aquarists have the opportunity to take careful care of their charges to maintain their well-being, and observe their growth and reproduction. Uniquely within the animal care field, they can also enjoy the aesthetic and biophilic rewards of beautiful, naturalistic glass habitats, and discovering little known facts about the exotic animals in their care, whose habits are often poorly understood or completely unknown. Aquarists might also feel good about their choice to work for a non-profit with a strong conservation and public education mandate that ostensibly contributes to the good of society. Although aquarists might experience satisfaction from work that engages with sustainability, conservation and the environment, this engagement may represent another double- edged sword.
Caring for the Environment can be Stressful
Sustainability work has its own set of stressors that may affect those in the aquarium field. Mnguni (2010), in her study of sustainability organizations, suggests that the core of sustainability work is confronting the “end of the world as we know it” (p. 125). She further suggests that facing ecological degradation can evoke deep sadness and alienation which, in sustainability workers, could result in feelings of “confusion and emotional burnout” (p. 125).
Aquarists may grapple with many facets of ecological degradation—some of which they may encounter or learn of throughout the course of their work. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 29
For example, the Vancouver Aquarium is sounding a public alarm with a campaign about microplastics in the ocean (Boynton & Aylesworth, 2018) supported by messaging aimed at visitors throughout the aquarium. For aquarists, many of whom profess a strong affinity to the ocean, this messaging may function as a daily reminder of the magnitude of environmental challenges society is facing, and thus be a source of stress. Aquarists may also be concerned that their work is not doing enough to influence conservation of animals in the wild or, given the scope of environmental issues requiring urgent attention, to influence pro-environmental behaviour in aquarium visitors. Working in an organization focused on the environment, conservation and education may result in staff who have higher levels of environmental awareness than the general public, as detailed below.
Additionally, in recent years, staff at the Vancouver Aquarium have found themselves embroiled in public controversies concerning whether zoos and aquariums should exist at all and accusations that keeping whales and other large mammals is cruel (Givetash, 2016). Activists regularly hold protests outside the facility. These kinds of issues, and the other stressors discussed, could arguably affect the morale and emotional well-being of the aquarists. To properly understand the unique stressors that may affect aquarists dealing with the disjunct between their conservation, public education and quasi-entertainment missions, it is useful to delve more deeply into the “visitor experience” in its broader context.
Aquariums: Connection, Conservation, and Controversy
Zoos and aquariums are popular places for people of all ages to visit, but they also inspire heated ethical debates. Each year, more than 134 million people throughout North America visit BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 30
institutions accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), indicating that such organizations are in a unique position to provide widespread environmental and conservation education to a broad demographic (Patrick, Matthews, Ayers, & Tunnicliffe, 2007). This popularity, coupled with a documented decrease in recent years of direct nature experiences and recreation (Nielsen, 2008; Pergams & Zaradic, 2008) suggests the potential that zoos and aquariums hold for exposing and hopefully connecting people to the non-human world. To their visitors and members, zoos and aquariums are typically viewed as places of conservation, learning and family entertainment (Roe & McConney, 2014). To their detractors, however, zoos and aquariums may be viewed as ineffective at achieving their conservation goals at best
(Jamieson, 1985; Keulartz, 2015; Tribe & Booth, 2003) and as sites of cruelty to animals at worst (Jamieson, 1985; Pynn, 2016). Those who staff zoos and aquariums may find themselves in the position of defending their choice of work within their social circles—potentially amplified by the pervasive nature of social media. Despite, or, perhaps, because of the extensive controversies surrounding many zoos and aquariums, social science research in this realm has remained narrowly focused on aspects of visitor learning and engagement.
Beyond the Visitor Experience
The stressors associated with working in an animal care capacity in zoos and aquariums are poorly understood. Not only do we lack insight into these dimensions of animal care-related work, the sector as a whole seems to avoid addressing them. While Groff, Lockhart, Ogden, and
Dierking (2006) focused their work on changes in conservation-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour in staff working in an accredited facility, the majority of social science research in the BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 31
zoo and aquarium industry is centred around visitor experiences (Esson & Moss, 2013; Falk,
Heimlich, & Bronnenkant, 2008; Luebke, Watters, Packer, Miller, & Powell, 2016; Marino,
Malamud, Nobis, Broglio, & Lilienfeld, 2010; Myers, Saunders, & Birjulin, 2004; Roe &
McConney, 2014).
This focus on visitor experience is understandable. The Association of Zoos and
Aquariums (AZA), the North American zoo and aquarium accreditation organization, states its vision as “a world where, as a result of the work of accredited zoos and aquariums, all people respect, value, and conserve wildlife and wild places” (Association of Zoos and Aquariums,
2015, para. 3). Because zoos and aquariums operate under public scrutiny which has intensified in recent years (Lawrence, 2014; Pynn, 2016), museum evaluation and visitor studies researchers have increasingly studied visitor experience in these institutions to determine whether they are meeting their conservation and education goals and how they might better do so (Schram, 2011).
Groff et al. (2006)’s research on Disney’s Animal Kingdom staff revealed that interactions between animal-care staff and other non-animal-care staff were a key component to the increased conservation-related knowledge, attitudes and behaviour they observed in all facility staff. This speaks well to the AZA’s mission statement: that beyond visitors, the staff themselves can become more engaged with conservation issues simply from working in an AZA- accredited facility and its attendant conservation-oriented messaging. Many non-animal-care staff that Groff et al. interviewed referred specifically to the importance of the time they had spent either with animals, or with the animal-care staff, who they were able to learn from. Thus, the experiences that animal-care staff have throughout their daily work have the potential to BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 32
impact more than just their own emotional state and level of stress: these experiences could also impact staff in other areas of the aquarium, and subsequently influence visitor experience either indirectly or directly.
Visitor and audience research and evaluation is important, and the emergence of similar research on the staff in zoos and aquariums is promising, but there is a need to delve deeper and bring the fundamental experience of the aquarists’ work itself into the bigger picture of social studies in this realm. Where visitor experiences are the primary focus in both the institution and its larger accrediting bodies and research fields, staff may feel that they are outside of the frame—that their own perspectives, stresses, and experiences of working with animals are not relevant to the work of engaging visitors and the larger community.
The current lack of focus on the experience of those whose work makes these organizations and their primary attractions possible, may ultimately be detrimental to individual organizations and the zoo and aquarium industry as a whole, and influence the industry’s ability to do the important conservation work it seeks to do. Therefore, understanding both rewarding and difficult aspects of aquarists’ work experience has importance beyond worker welfare.
Anxiety, Psychic Pain, and Defensiveness
Mawson (2000) claims there are “mental pains to be borne in working at any task” (p.
67), and it is easy for me to recall situations I found myself in, throughout my career as an aquarist, that were mentally painful. According to psychoanalytic theory, if some aspects—both conscious and unconscious—of work are experienced by workers as anxiety-inducing or are otherwise psychically painful, unconscious defense mechanisms may be provoked (Adams, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 33
2014; Hinshelwood & Skogstad, 2000; Mnguni, 2010). For example, Cramer (2006) defines the defense mechanism denial its simplest form as “a mental operation in which attention is withdrawn from external stimuli that, if recognized, would cause psychological pain or upset” (p.
44). When we’re confronted by painful emotions, we avoid thinking about them (Adams, 2014;
Norgaard, 2006).
The concept of defense mechanisms originated with Freud’s psychoanalytic work in 1894 and are considered to be unconscious processes, functioning to prevent excessive anxiety and to restore or maintain functionality (Cramer, 2006). Since then, its definition has expanded to include mechanisms that activate as reactions both to undesirable internal drives and impulses, and external sources of stress. Cramer (2006) distinguishes between defense mechanisms and coping strategies or mechanisms 11 , although both things are “aroused by situations involving psychological disequilibrium” (p. 8). Coping strategies may be consciously recognized by the individual, require “conscious, purposeful effort” (p.8), and are typically carried out with the intent of “managing or solving a problem situation” (Cramer, 2006, p. 8) Both fall under the broader category of defensiveness , a more general term that refers to behaviours that protect the individual from “anxiety, loss of self-esteem, or other disrupting emotions” (Cramer, 2006, p.
10).
Although anxieties and conflicts provoked by work may be dealt with by the development of individual psychological defense or coping mechanisms, “defensiveness can also be locked into the social system” (Hinshelwood & Skogstad, 2000, p. 4). Menzies Lyth (1960)
11 Cramer (2006) uses the terms coping mechanisms or coping strategies interchangeably. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 34
described the social defense system as featuring an “orientation to helping the individual avoid the experience of anxiety, guilt, doubt and uncertainty” (p. 109). Workers may cope with these anxieties on a social level by engaging in “defensive techniques” which are used to contain and modify them (Menzies Lyth, 1960). Individuals “co-operate in shared aspects of the social system to support more rigid and primitive defence mechanisms in the individuals”
(Hinshelwood & Skogstad, 2000, p. 4). Mawson (2000) suggests that we have learned to do this by installing “defences against the painful realities of the work into our ways of arranging tasks, rules, and procedures” (p. 67). These defensive techniques (i.e., tasks, rules, and procedures) can sometimes be encompassed in the culture of an organization (Hinshelwood & Skogstad, 2000).
Mnguni (2010) warns us that “when attendant anxiety is insufficiently acknowledged, defensive routines are likely to undermine collective effort” (p. 118).
If aquarists do experience some form of mental pain12 as part of their daily work, such as the task-related anxiety typified by care work (Menzies Lyth, 1960), sustainability work-related anxiety (Mnguni, 2010), or the stress inherent in public ethical scrutiny of one’s chosen employer and occupation, I suggest aquarists may be susceptible to similar kinds of psychological impacts, reducing their resilience and making them more prone to burnout, perhaps even finding themselves ambivalent about the industry itself. I believe that understanding anxiety and defensiveness, which can manifest both individually and organizationally, is a key component of investigating the psychosocial dimensions of working as an aquarist in a modern aquarium.
12 Mental pain is referred to somewhat interchangeably by Mnguni (2010) as “psychic pain” (p. 118). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 35
Summary: The Aquarist Experience is Unique and Worthy of Study
In many ways, the aquarists themselves embody both the institutional relationship to the animals and may reflect the overall field of human-animal relationships. Aquarists are intimately involved in difficult ethical quandaries and may have to make decisions about an animals’ quality of life or level of suffering when making decisions about euthanasia, much as veterinarians may, and this may represent a significant source of stress. Staff in zoos or aquariums work with arguably the widest variety of species, compared to, say, veterinary or domestic pet professionals or livestock workers, and may work with species rarely, if ever, encountered by most people. We might even joke that they are “playing God.” In this way, I feel that the experiences of zoo and aquarium staff represent a critical nexus between the human and non-human worlds. This deserves our curiosity and investigation.
While aquarists themselves deserve a chance at having a good professional quality of life, especially given the many sacrifices they undertake to do the work, an improved understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of working as an aquarist could be valuable to modern zoos and aquariums and their larger accreditation bodies, such as the AZA. Psychosocial research considers the “unconscious communications, dynamics, and defences that exist in the research environment” (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009, p. 19). The social defense systems and anxieties that arose in nurses in Menzies Lyth’s study suggest that, given the nature of the potentially anxiety- producing labour, similar social defense systems may exist in the public aquarium work environment. Therefore, I have chosen to employ a psychosocial lens in attempting to understand BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 36
the ways in which psychological aspects of worker experience, such as mental pain, connect to the broader organizational and cultural context.
Understanding individual aquarist work experience and its possible connection to social defense systems—in all its rich, emotional complexity—could also improve organizational ability to support staff in dealing with any workplace-specific anxiety or inner tensions and conflict, thus supporting their resiliency, well-being, and long-term ability to stay engaged with their work in a meaningful way, as well as with the zoo and aquarium industry. Ultimately, engaged and satisfied staff will better contribute to their organization’s conservation and sustainability goals, and the welfare of the many animals living in public aquariums.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 37
Interlude: The Finer Points of Euthanasia by Hammer
It’s the black garbage bags that still haunt me. Taped up, and still moving.
Still moving. But they’re supposed to be dead. They’re supposed to be dead, because
I just slit open that fish’s belly and searched in its liver to remove a PIT tag so it could be re-used for another broodstock fish, later. You are not supposed to do that to something alive.
I’m in the greenhouse at Northern Tilapia, in Lindsay, Ontario, where I work part-time. I’m at Sir Sanford Fleming College getting my Aquaculture diploma, and I’m an excellent student.
My professors had helped me get hired on at Northern Tilapia. The same profs who knew Lee Newman, the man who’d done his aquaculture technician diploma in the same place, and been hired as a Curator at the Vancouver
Aquarium. As soon as I heard that, the choice to enrol in the aquaculture program here in Lindsay was obvious. I had grown up watching Danger Bay, filmed at the
Vancouver Aquarium. Danger Bay and having my home aquariums had inspired my love for fish, and helped me hatch the dream of working at the Vancouver
Aquarium as an aquarist. I had never been to a public aquarium, but I knew simply that this one on TV looked really cool, and if I liked fish, I should work there. So my Dad, empowering me as always, got me on the phone with someone at the aquarium who’d advised that hands on skills were desirable, and so we found out about this program at Fleming College.
If this program was good enough for Lee Newman, then I was in. I excelled, and now I’m here at Northern Tilapia, watching a black garbage bag full of discarded, supposed-to-be-dead fish jump and writhe as I learn the finer points of smashing a tilapia’s head in to try to kill it. Tilapia are cichlids, so they were BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 38
every bit as intelligent as the Oscars 13 who’d been my favourite and most interactive home aquarium pets. If I was going to have to kill these fish, the only option was to be good at it. I watched as Adam, the young blonde fellow, instructed me. He added a torturous flair. “See, you can get it right in the eye!” He laughs, and wails his hammer into the soft fish eyeball, and I watch as it bursts, the eye socket crumbling into bloody, slimy shards of bone.
It’s sick and fucked up. But I have to be okay doing this work if I want to get to my dream job at the Aquarium. I have to just be very, very good. And hey, I’m as strong and capable as one of these guys, so if this is what we’re doing, ok. I won’t be cruel; I will be efficient and excellent at killing these fish so that they don’t suffer at my hammer. I won’t be fucked up and disrespectful, like Adam. I learn how to hit them right in the sweet spot on the head that kills them as rapidly as is possible.
After the shift, I go back to the college. I’m kind of hoping to run into one of my profs, as I’m covered in fish scales, blood and mucous, and I’m hoping they’ll see how hard I’ve been working, and maybe tell me it’s ok, and normal, that I’m covered in fish scales, mucous and blood. I don’t find anyone.
The dreams of bodies in black garbage bags are disturbing. In them, the bags writhe and jump. Sometimes there are fish in the bags. Sometimes it’s not fish, but my brain won’t quite tell me what is in the bags; what is supposed to be dead, but clearly isn’t. In the dreams I feel sick and disgusted.
13 Oscars are another highly intelligent cichlid species. Cichlids are admired among aquarium hobbyists for their intelligence, interactivity, and high level of parental care. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 39
Chapter 3: Research Methodology
My research was focused on exploring the psychosocial 14 dimensions of the experience of working as an aquarist at the Vancouver Aquarium. I therefore utilized a psychosocial lens, reflected in the methodology, to understand the experiential and emotional dimensions including both rewarding and traumatic aspects of the work. Specifically, I hoped to uncover anxiety- provoking aspects of the work, and unconscious dimensions that might contribute to the activation of both individual and organizational defense and/or coping mechanisms.
Research Questions
As stated in Chapter 1, the over-arching research questions guiding my project are:
1) What are the specific stressors of being an aquarist at the Vancouver
Aquarium?
2) How do aquarists appear to navigate or negotiate them?
The following research sub-questions guided my work throughout the research process. I continued to hone them during the data analysis phase as I further uncovered complexities within the work lives of the aquarists I interviewed.
1. How might aquarists consciously or unconsciously negotiate and make sense of
difficult and/or potentially emotionally troubling experiences that arise throughout the
course of their work?
14 The Association for Psychosocial Studies (2018) defines “psychosocial” as the ways in which “subjective experience is interwoven with social life”. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 40
2. Which, if any, aspects of the work experience provoke anxiety, whether conscious or
otherwise, in the aquarist staff?
3. How might aquarists process and/or negotiate the experiences of working under
public ethical scrutiny, and encountering polarized views of both their work and the
organization for whom they work?
4. How might some of the stressors experienced manifest as forms of defensiveness
such as “defense mechanisms” or “coping strategies”—and if so, what can we
observe?
5. What did aquarists find rewarding and satisfying about their work?
6. What changes to the working situation might realistically be made to support
aquarists’ well-being and professional quality of life?
A Psychoanalytically-informed Research Approach
In considering how best to explore my research questions, I chose to move away from traditional qualitative research interview methods. Such methods tend to be pointed—what
Lertzman (2015) refers to as “frontal” (p. 43)— and to ask specific questions. The problem with this approach as it relates to the research questions above is that it presumes my research informants would be both transparent to themselves and have ready access to complex experiential dimensions. This has not been borne out not to be the case, based on decades of clinical research (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, 2008). Because I aimed to explore both conscious and unconscious dimensions of the aquarist’ work experience, such a traditional approach would be problematic, and restrict the data to only what could be openly spoken of by the informants, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 41
or to only what I inquired specifically about. It also risks putting people “on the spot” and inducing a defensive reaction that might undermine my objective to understand people’s experience as fully as possible, including aspects of those experiences that may be hard to articulate or access. Therefore, a research methodology that presents the potential and opportunity to effectively explore unconscious processes and dynamics was needed.
Psychosocial methods aim to address an increasing dissatisfaction with strictly interview- based and other methods common to qualitative research, which Clarke and Hoggett (2009) note seemed content to remain at the discursive level, as if respondents were “fully knowledgeable actors with no unconscious or defenses which make it difficult for them to think/talk about things” (p.27). Presuming this is not the case, and that it might be difficult for the participants to articulate any anxiety, stress, and trauma they may have encountered throughout their work experience, it was important to me to understand that the research participants may be
“defended”, and to employ a methodology that took these ideas into consideration.
The defended subject.
The concept of the defended subject refers to a research informant who is “defended” against experiencing anxiety, which may be caused by threats to the self or other anxiety- inducing scenarios in which painful material may be encountered, such as during the interview process, and which mobilizes defenses at a largely unconscious level (Adams, 2014; Hollway &
Jefferson, 2008). Because the informant is likely to be “defended,” the interviewer must be aware that the story she hears may not be straightforward or reliable (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009;
Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, 2008; Lertzman, 2015). In my research, I suspected the participants BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 42
might be defended against experiencing the psychic pain of their work or the anxieties provoked by the work, for the sake of maintaining both individual and organizational functionality. Since my assumption rested on psychoanalytic conceptualizations of defense mechanisms, I chose to employ a research method which engaged a psychoanalytically-informed approach and considered the unconscious communications, dynamics, and defenses that exist in the research environment created (Adams, 2014; Cartwright, 2004; Hollway & Jefferson, 2008).
The dialogic, relational interview.
To answer my research questions, and explore “beneath the surface and beyond the purely discursive” (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009, p. 19), I employed a qualitative, case study approach and utilized Dialogic, Relational Interviews (DRI) to collect data. Lertzman (2015) designed this research methodology by “recognizing the presence of defence mechanisms— activated by anxieties—as central to establishing a new form of environmental social science research approach” (p. 44). I felt this interview technique was appropriate because, as Clarke and
Hoggett (2009) illuminate, if we are not taking at face value what our participants are telling us, we need a method that ensures our findings are not simply an imposition of our own preconceptions. While there are numerous methods for achieving this, the DRI method offered an integrative solution that is participative and facilitated my participants’ involvement in construction of interpretation. This co-construction of interpretation occurs primarily in the process of the research encounter, where, as detailed later, I asked responsive questions, sought clarification, reflected back what I heard, and checked in or confirmed a feeling I had about what they had shared. In other words, the research encounter was a “dialogue”. My ability to do this BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 43
was significantly enhanced by my own work history as an aquarist and subsequent ease with technical terminology or experiences that most members of the public would find puzzling.
Lertzman developed the DRI by utilizing techniques from Wengraf’s Biographical
Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) (Wengraf, 2001), Hollway & Jefferson’s Free-
Associative Narrative Interviews (FANI) (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000), and Cartwright’s
Psychoanalytic Research Interview (PRI) (Cartwright, 2002, 2004). The DRI approach uses a
“Single Question Aimed at Inducing Narrative” (SQUIN) (Wengraf, 2001), and the psychoanalytic method of free association, which aims to elicit a narrative that is “not structured according to conscious logic, but according to unconscious logic: that is, the associations follow pathways defined by emotional motivations, rather than rational intentions” (Hollway &
Jefferson, 2000, p. 13). Unlike a traditional narrative approach, however, a narrative elicited with the principles of free association may defy conventions and enable the researcher to better detect contradictions, avoidances, etc. (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000).
The interview technique, as detailed below, relies on trust, rapport, and containment—" the capacity to contain one's own feelings as well as the feelings of others” (Clarke & Hoggett,
2009, p. 34) — between the researcher and the participant. Therefore, I chose my participants from a pool of colleagues with whom I had worked at the Vancouver Aquarium, and with whom
I had enjoyed a good rapport and in many cases friendship, over the years in which we were colleagues. I conducted a total of ten interviews, with five participants, between January and
April of 2018. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 44
Data Collection
I met with the participants in their homes or my home office. The primary goal was to have a quiet space away from the primary job site where we could be sure we would not be interrupted, and which provided more of a ‘holding space’ or ‘container’. Meeting at either of our homes also helped to maintain confidentiality, and I did not want the participants to feel they were “on”—having to take a role they may don for the needs of their particular jobs. Meeting off-site, I hoped they would feel free to reflect on their work from a personal level.
I recorded the interviews, and avoided taking notes or otherwise breaking the rapport between the participant and myself (Wengraf, 2001). I tried to maintain a sense of “presence” and dialogue with the participant, as inspired by Cartwright’s PRI approach (Cartwright, 2004).
In keeping with the imperative for researcher reflexivity the psychosocial approach calls for (detailed later), within an hour of each interview, I wrote an “instant post-interview debriefing” memo (Wengraf, 2001, p. 142) for myself, where I paid careful attention to my own feeling states, thoughts or perceptions before, during and after the interview. I recorded my impressions of the overall narrative, any follow-up questions or interpretations that immediately occurred to me, and any strong feelings (or times where I myself changed the subject) which I felt arose at any point during each interview.
The interview process.
Inspired by Lertzman (2015) and Hollway and Jefferson (2000), and in keeping with an open-ended inquiry that elicits a narrative, I developed a SQUIN 15 to use in beginning the
15 “Single Question Aimed at Inducing Narrative” (Wengraf, 2001) BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 45
interviews with participants. The SQUIN was “I’d like you to start by telling me what brought you to work at the aquarium. You can start wherever you like and say whatever comes to mind. I will listen first, without interrupting. Please tell me the story of how you came to work at the
Aquarium. Take all the time you need and start anywhere you want to.”
The SQUIN approach provided some structure to the interview, yet mostly aimed to invite participants to speak and to encourage free associations. To encourage participants to speak freely, I developed a “preamble” to the SQUIN, primarily to let the participants know how the interview will be conducted; that I will not interrupt them; that they are encouraged to speak at length on anything they wish to; and that there are no right or wrong things to say in the interview. Further, before I ever sat down with the participants, I designed the consent form and e-mail invitations for participants as an important part of the initial process of building rapport, and of setting the stage in terms of where the interview would go. I designed these communications to be very open-ended and warm, while still meeting the Royal Roads
University Research Ethics Board’s informed consent considerations and requirements of performing the research. On the consent form, I said only that the project focused on the experiences of animal care workers at the Aquarium.
The preamble I developed explained that the interview would not be so much of a question-and-answer style interview, and that it would be more conversational in nature. I assured the participant of the confidentiality of our interview, that we would spend about an hour or so speaking, and that they were free to stop the interview at any time. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 46
Further, I explained that I was doing this project because since I had left my full-time job at the Aquarium, I was reflecting a lot on what it meant to me to do that kind of work, and that I was curious about the experience of others. I said my intention was to give a voice to the full spectrum of experience one can have as an aquarist, and that I was therefore interested in their honest reflections and experiences. I mentioned that I felt there was sometimes pressure to be positive when speaking about our jobs but that I didn’t have that expectation. I told the participants that it was possible that difficult topics may come up and assured them that they did not have to speak about anything they did not want to. I concluded the preamble by reminding them that there were no right or wrong things to say and asked if they had any questions. Rarely did they have any, so I would then move on to delivering the SQUIN.
Sometimes I noticed that the participants seemed relieved when they heard the SQUIN, as it seemed light and easy for them to talk about in most cases. Two participants responded by saying they had told this story many times before, so it was kind of rehearsed, but that it was therefore no problem for them to start there. In other cases, I had not even finished the passage before the participants gave me some indication that they were ready to speak, so, I felt this
SQUIN worked well in these interviews to begin the process of exploring the work experience with each participant.
I continued to maintain and build the trust, rapport, and containment 16 this technique relies on throughout the interview process. Douglas (2007) defines containment as occurring
16 I based my practice of providing containment on Lertzman (2015), who cites Bion (1962). Lertzman cultivated a mood of receptivity in her interviews, listened in a way that the participants felt understood, and responded with BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 47
“when one person receives and understands the emotional communication of another without being overwhelmed by it and communicates it back to the other person” (p. 3). As participants spoke, I actively engaged and listened in a way that would ensure they felt encouraged to continue to speak on whatever they were speaking about, especially early on in the interviews.
Inspired by Hollway and Jefferson (2000) I focused on allowing each story to finish, on repeating what I had heard, and saying things such as “Right,” “Wow,” or, “I’d love to hear more about that…”. I made sure to maintain appropriate eye contact, mirrored their positions or gestures when appropriate, and nodded. Because the participants in many cases were friends, and people I had previously had many in-depth conversations with, this often came naturally and easily.
I alternated between this type of engagement and encouragement to speak and a more focused approach, which was inspired both by Hollway and Jefferson (2000) and developed further for my specific project in collaboration with my supervisor and based on her previous research (Lertzman, 2015). Examples of the focusing comments I used include “can you tell me more about that?” or “help me understand…”, which I used when I wanted to explore further within a particular topic or sought clarification on something that struck me as interesting or provocative. Sometimes I said “what I’m hearing is…” and I would feed back some of what the participant had said either just then, or in a previous interview. I did this as often as it felt
empathy when possible. She wanted to “‘take in’ and create a mental space for the participant’s experiences, including any anxieties they may have regarding the research interview” (p.53). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 48
appropriate, so that I remained conscientious about listening in a way that the participant felt understood, thus facilitating containment.
I also developed prompts to stimulate reflection and attempt to generate a response from the participants. In many cases the conversations naturally flowed toward areas of interest for this project. In other cases, the participants seemed to run out of things to say, or they seemed more reliant on me to provide prompts to discuss. This was the case primarily during the first interviews, and especially if the participant seemed nervous, likely owing to the nature of the interview process itself.
I developed these prompts in collaboration with my supervisor, in the spirit of Hollway and Jefferson (2000), using open-ended questions, and avoiding asking “why” questions or using the term “think” much, to avoid intellectualisation, which might have risked the interviews veering to a more discursive style. Examples of some of the additional prompts I developed for the first interviews are: “I’d like you to reflect for a moment about how you may have related to your work when you started out. How did you feel about it back then? Can you sense if it may have changed?”; and, “If I said to you ‘the Aquarium could be a complicated place to work,’ how might that resonate with you?”. I sometimes shared my own stories, delivered in a similar vein, to probe whether it inspired recognition from the participant, and to take the first step in terms of sharing my own vulnerability within the setting of the interview, hopefully adding to the sense of containment within the research encounter. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 49
After the first interview was complete, I explained to the participants that I would be going through our first interview to develop some ideas for things to follow up on, and that they were welcome to consider the same. We would then plan our next meeting.
At the follow-up (second) interview, I opened up by saying “I’m curious if anything came to mind since we last spoke?” I wanted to give the participants the chance to lead if they desired. Most often they declined and wanted me to begin with some prompts for them. As detailed in the analysis section, I developed specific prompts around topics I wanted to follow up on with each participant after I had listened to, read through and performed a first layer of analysis on the transcript of their first interview. Further, I listened to the first interview again immediately before meeting with the participants so that it would be fresh in my mind. In this way I was able to use similar wording and better recall what participants said, thus creating a sense of being heard, which would be important to our continued rapport and trust, as well as allowing the participant to better follow their original narrative.
Also important to the DRI approach is that additional questions follow the gestalt 17 of the original narratives and stories as told by the participant. I therefore paid attention not just to the content, but to how it was shared, and in follow-up interviews I approached the topics in the same order as they were originally shared to facilitate and acknowledge the unconscious flow of associations that may have formed. Hollway and Jefferson (2000) encourage researchers who want to elicit narratives to follow up using respondents’ ordering and phrasing. Hollway and
17 Hollway and Jefferson (2000) define ‘ gestalt’ as a “whole which is more than the sum of its parts, an order, or hidden agenda” (p. 11). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 50
Jefferson (2000); Lertzman (2015) likens this to “tracing footsteps in the snow” (p. 47). In some cases, I went into the second interview expecting to do this, but changed approach as dictated by the participant, such as if they approached topics of interest in a different order.
Researcher and participant dynamics.
Hollway and Jefferson (2000) suggest that “as researchers… we cannot be detached but must examine our subjective involvement because it will help shape the way in which we interpret the interview data” (p. 9). The interviewer/researcher should account for their own subjectivity by remaining attuned to their own “sensations, reflections, and responses and to maintain a sense of ‘presence’ and dialog with the participant” (Lertzman, 2015, p. 47). Hollway and Jefferson (2000) remark that this process of self-scrutiny is complex and challenging for the very reason that both the researcher and the subject are “simultaneously influencing each other”
(p. 10). This refers to the relational approach, in which “all research is an expression of both the investigator’s desires, intentions and unconscious processes and that what evolves in the research encounter is co-produced and mutually constitutive” (Lertzman, 2015, p. 56).
Due to participant and researcher dynamics, countertransference is considered an integral part of this research methodology. Countertransference, as explained by Walkerdine, Lucey, and
Melody (2001) occurs when the researcher experiences an unconscious response to the participant or to significant people and other factors of the participant’s life or experience, or their own emotional reaction to the topic at hand. Researcher experiences of countertransference can contribute to forming some levels of data analysis, because emotions experienced by the researcher, rather than the research participant, offer significant assistance in pointing to and BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 51
understanding what might not or cannot be expressed by the participant (Walkerdine et al.,
2001). I did find that numerous emotions were stirred up during and after the interviews, and, as
I listened through them again. I carefully noted these in my memos when they were especially noticeable during my first layer of analysis.
Participation Selection and Ethical Considerations
Following approval of my Royal Roads University Research Ethics Board application, my initial criteria for selecting participants was related to the length of their employment and employment status. However, I will not share the detailed criteria here, in the interest of protecting the participants’ confidentiality as much as possible. I did want to ensure that the participants had a reasonable amount of experience in the industry, and that they’d left the
“honeymoon” period associated with a new job. The participants in this project, to me, represented the role of Bunderson & Thompson’s “zookeeper with a calling” (2009), one who, much like the members of the animal care community introduced by Figley and Roop (2006), cares so much that their work, in a sense, becomes their lives.
At the time the data collection was conducted, I worked part-time as an aquarist in the fish research laboratory at the Vancouver Aquarium which helped to maintain friendly and long- term connections around the building with many current and past colleagues. I believed many of them would be willing to consider speaking with me, due to the long-term nature and mutual respect of our workplace relationships. Indeed, I received a warm reception from each of them I approached. I initially casually asked the potential participant if they’d be interested in participating in a project with me, and if they assented, I sent a more formal invitation. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 52
I sent individual e-mail invitations, approved by Royal Roads University, to a list of potential participants who met my criteria and who I anticipated as interested in participating in an interview process with me. To ensure confidentiality, these invitations were addressed to their personal, not their institutional e-mail addresses.
Participants were offered complete anonymity. I therefore changed all individual identifying characteristics such as name, age, etc. in the following discussion to ensure that readers would not be able to identify the participant. Pertinent details such as animal names or species that might be used by those “in the know” to identify the participants have sometimes been changed as well. They were also offered the ability to withdraw their consent during the interview process, but for only two weeks thereafter at which point the major data analysis process was underway. None of the participants requested that their contribution be removed.
The need to protect the participants’ anonymity presented a challenge when it came time to introduce the participants in the analysis chapter. As detailed there, I avoided using a standard biographical format which, if accurate, would reveal too much detail to ensure anonymity, and if completely fabricated, would do a disservice to the reader in terms of becoming familiar with the participants whose stories informed the analysis. I therefore developed mini “pen portraits”, as introduced by Hollway and Jefferson (2000). Their pen portraits aimed to help the participant
“come alive for the reader”, serving as an alternative to the “whole” for the reader, who will not review raw data, but who needs to have an understanding of the participant in a case study, if the rest of the story, and anything said about the participant is going to be meaningful (Hollway &
Jefferson, 2000, p. 70). Because I considered the participants so engaged with their work, the pen BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 53
portraits in the analysis chapter focus primarily on how they related to their work and what brought them to it initially.
My intent was to conduct this research in as balanced, neutral and fair a way as I could, while still acknowledging my own biases and perspectives informed by my own work experience at the Aquarium. While my previous work experience at the Vancouver Aquarium might seem to pose a threat to the credibility of the research, I argue that it supported my ability to do this research. Because of my established relationships, I felt I was able to communicate on the level of the DRI approach (with trust, rapport, and containment central to the process) quite effectively with the participants, who were long-term, trusted colleagues. I felt there was an increased sense of shared connection and trust available because we both knew what it was like to be an aquarist: we each “got” it.
Data Analysis, Credibility, and Limitations
The data analysis was conducted, as with the data collection, applying principles of psychosocial research. I employed a narrative analysis approach, inspired by the holistic analysis and interpretation method (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Lertzman, 2015), which aims to keep the narrative context intact. Otherwise, in qualitative analysis, it is a common method to fragment the transcripts into codes which are then removed from their holistic context. By not fragmenting the data from the context of the interviews, I hoped I might avoid missing important aspects of the participants’ unconscious dynamics (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000), allowing me to present more of the entirety of the aquarist work experience, including any defense or coping mechanisms and emotional aspects. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 54
Clarke and Hoggett (2009) advise that priority should first be given to analyzing each case (in my case, two interviews per participant), to allow for the individual gestalt to emerge, which exposes an individual’s “trajectories, dilemmas, conflicts, turning points, loose ends, repetitions and fixations, resolutions, and so on” (p. 44).
As Wengraf (2001) suggests, I took full advantage of the impressions, experiences, and ideas stimulated by the re-hearing of each interview. As I listened through each interview initially, I made note of repeated phrases or re-hashing of stories when they occurred and interesting comments that I felt were worthy of follow-up in the next interview (in the case of first interviews). I was especially interested in contradictions, areas of tension, conflicts, sources of stress, and times where either I or the participant had changed the subject or interrupted either ourselves or one another with laughter or other changes of subject. In the cases that I discovered any contradictions, I would usually develop follow-up prompts to inquire after these in the second interview with that participant.
I also recorded my own reactions to what the participants had said, to interrogate my own emotional responses for the purpose of illuminating whether transference or counter-transference might be present, in an attempt to tease out whether I was projecting anything onto the participant.
On subsequent engagement with each transcript, I attended to core narratives, themes, and dynamics as they surfaced in the material (Cartwright, 2004; Lertzman, 2015), both within each interview and across multiple interviews (Lertzman, 2015). To facilitate this, I planned my initial work such that I was only working on analyzing the data of one participant at a time. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 55
Therefore, I did not move on to interviews with the next participant until I had completed the first layers of analysis on the final interview with that participant and had recorded my impressions in theoretical memos. This way, I stayed present with and felt more of a sense of immersion in the experience of each participant. As I moved on to each new participant, I frequently noticed the emergence of similar issues, turns of phrase, challenges, and frustrations that related to what earlier participants had shared, and I noted these cross-case similarities in my theoretical memos. Conversely, I also noticed ways in which the participants differed substantially in their reactions to difficulties or their ways of relating to their work experience, and I made careful note of these differences.
Credibility.
The DRI approach is labour intensive in that one must develop the rapport with the participant (each of these interviews ranged from 60-120 minutes in length), gather enough data to work with, work through the transcripts and recordings multiple times, and explore the data by hand—not with coding software (Lertzman, 2015). I was therefore limited in how many interviews I could reasonably conduct and analyze within the scope of a Master of Arts thesis. I focused early stages of analysis on any aspects of the work experience that might have led to experiences of anxiety, any indications of the activation of defense mechanisms, and frankly, anything else that seemed compelling or interesting to me even if I could not pinpoint why it initially was so. Once I had completed the interviews with the fifth participant, it was clear to me that I had reached saturation (Robson, 2011), a point where there seemed to be a lack of new, emerging data (Houghton, Casey, Shaw, & Murphy, 2013), and I knew I had enough material to BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 56
identify the core narratives and build the thematic analysis. Guest, Bunce, and Johnson (2006) found that despite completing 60 interviews, they reached saturation after 12 interviews, and noted most of the emergent themes after six. Fusch and Ness (2015) differentiate between data sets that are thick—as in quantity— or rich—as in quality— making the case that a small number of rich, or deeper, interviews can be similar in importance to dozens of shorter interviews. The DRI method produces rich, nuanced and in-depth data sets and beyond the scope limitations, the richness of the data I collected by interviewing five participants seemed more than sufficient to build the thematic analysis I present below.
Houghton et al. (2013) recommend that credibility can be enhanced in case studies by spending sufficient time in the field or case-study site to “gain a full understanding of the phenomenon under investigation” (p. 13). Prolonged involvement may also allow a trusting relationship between the participants and researcher to develop, which may reduce the chance of the participants giving biased information (Robson, 2011). Although the data collection took place offsite, I worked in the job I researched for more than thirteen years, which afforded me a very rich understanding of the phenomenon along with the development of trusting relationships.
Both factors enhance the credibility of my research.
Once all the interviews and the first layer of data analysis were complete, I started to take more of a cross-case perspective, as recommended by Clarke and Hoggett (2009). This facilitated the emergence of certain themes, which, through visual mapping, became the building blocks of the analysis I present. The themes that emerged from the data were then by cross- checked throughout multiple stages of the analysis by my supervisor Dr. Lertzman, an BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 57
experienced psychosocial researcher. The joint involvement by Dr. Lertzman, as Hollway and
Jefferson (2000) encourage, allowed us to interrogate “suspected lapses of judgment in the other” (p.18), thus guarding against the threat of ‘wild analysis 18 ’. This served as a form of peer debriefing, in which the goal was not to interpret things in the exact same way, but to determine if Dr. Lertzman agreed with the structure of the data and the logical paths I took to arrive at the categories (Houghton et al., 2013). Clarke and Hoggett (2009) also recommend a form of peer debriefing, by obtaining different perspectives on the data by involving others (they mention peers, colleagues, and/or supervisors) as a sounding board—the perspective of the ‘third’, as it is called in psychoanalysis. They also highlight the importance of researcher personal reflexivity
(e.g. my own writing, memos, and counselling) in avoiding wild analysis.
Reflexivity.
Psychosocial research demands that the researcher be reflexive: engaged in “sustained self-reflection on our methods and practice, on our emotional involvement in the research, and on the affective relationship between ourselves and the researched” (Clarke & Hoggett, 2009, p.
19). Houghton et al. (2013) also discuss the importance of self-awareness to the credibility of qualitative case studies and recommend maintaining a reflexive diary detailing the rationale for decisions, instincts, and personal challenges, experienced by the researcher, which may also account for how the researcher’s history and personal interests brought them to the research, all of which forms a kind of audit trail. I engaged in this form of reflexivity in several ways.
18 Wild psychoanalysis denotes “amateur attempts at psychoanalysis based on ignorance or misunderstandings of its fundamental ideas, such endeavors being characterized by attempts to rush the process of analysis through premature interpretations” (Oxfordreference.com, Def. 1). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 58
Throughout the data collection phase, I wrote autobiographical stories and reflective work detailing my time at the Aquarium and aspects of my life related to my passion for fish.
Vignettes from those stories are presented as interludes throughout this thesis. Beyond the personal writing and post-interview debriefing memos (discussed above), I also kept personal notes, ongoing theoretical memos, and layered comments within the transcripts as I analyzed them multiple times.
At the recommendation of my supervisor, I ensured I was actively engaged in a counselling relationship during the period of time where I was conducting the research. This enhanced my own self-awareness and allowed me to focus more on the participants’ stories, since I could process my own feelings both in my own reflective work and in the context of a therapeutic relationship.
Still, because the participants were both colleagues and friends, and despite my sense that this increased trust and rapport was an asset to the research, it may have affected the research process in other ways that I detail in the Discussion section (Chapter 5). As is clear in the
Introduction and the included personal interludes, I have often romanticized and idealized my role as an aquarist, perhaps as a way of keeping my dream alive even when evidence suggested not everything about the work was “dreamy.” It is possible that because the participants were friends, they knew me well enough to understand that tendency, and could have felt some pressure to collaborate in that idealization or otherwise speak positively about the work. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 59
This research approach offered opportunities to enhance credibility by the use of triangulation , as explained by Robson (2011) 19 . While I did not engage in member-checking due to time and scope constraints, my triangulation process emerged from multiple sources as discussed above: the post-interview debriefing, the reflexive writing, notes and theoretical memos I created during both the initial re-listening process and data analysis phase as a whole, and consistent cross-checking with Dr. Lertzman.
This research was conducted only with employees and former employees of the
Vancouver Aquarium. Therefore, the results may not generalize to aquarists working in other institutions.
Interlude: The Female Stingray
She didn’t have a name. I knew exactly who she was though; her light grey sandpapery disc, her tangerine-orange oscillations; hence the common name, ocellated river stingray. We called them ‘the motoros’, though. Potamotrygon motoro . To know the animals’ Latin names was a sign you were a true biologist, and scientifically curious beyond liking the animals from a simplistic pet-owner perspective.
She knew exactly when it was feeding time. I’d open the door, letting it slam unceremoniously behind me, as I had done the very first time I fed her, a decade before, and every time since. By the time I’d scaled the slippery aluminum ladder to the edge of the tank, she and the others had heard the door, and would be
19 “Triangulation is a valuable and widely used strategy involving the use of multiple sources to enhance the rigour of the research” (Robson, 2011, p. 158). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 60
waiting, demanding I place smelt under their slippery discs, and blowing expert jets of water at my face if my dispensing speed seemed insufficient.
I’d pulled her out from this exhibit before; things are not always harmonious between fishes in a contained aquarium display. The male stingray was prone to harassing her, and she may have been injured by the massive pectoral spines of the large redtail catfish. I’d previously nursed her back to health from a major wing tear, by dangerously—but, effectively—mixing fresh and saltwater inflow valves to provide a low-level salinity treatment, which would help her regulate her osmotic balance, and prevent infection of the wound. There was very little room for error, since she was a freshwater stingray from the Amazon. Each day, as I balanced and monitored those valves before leaving, I found myself second-guessing whether it would be okay and whether I should leave and go home… the spectre of WHAT IF I overdosed her on saltwater loomed.
It worked, and she was back on exhibit. But, within several months, the wounds had reoccurred—after all, nothing had changed in the exhibits in terms of fish composition, and I wasn’t entirely sure who the perpetrator was.
The tank I had used to nurse her back to health was full of other fish, so although it was imperative that she be removed from the exhibit again, I had nowhere to put her, except an old concrete tank in the hallway that we rarely used for holding fish. My challenge, then, was to plumb tropical freshwater to the concrete tank so I could accommodate the female stingray for her convalescence.
As usual, there was general time pressure due to not only the stingray’s condition, but the care tasks demanded by the whole rest of the collection, and ongoing discussions and additional work around the Aquarium expansion. I figured I could run a line from upper quarantine: I could hook a vinyl hose to the valves behind the tall rectangular tanks, zap-strap it to the ceiling, and have it come down into BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 61
the hallway tank, so I could provide warm freshwater from our central filtration system to the female stingray.
I was working in upper quarantine trying to hook up the hose, when Mark, one of the engineering staff, offered to help. The valves were behind the tall tanks, which made it tougher for someone of my diminutive stature to hook it up, and I’m sure I seemed a bit frazzled, too.
Mark climbed up on the ladder, and asked which water—which should be obvious, because I’m the dedicated tropical freshwater aquarist. “TFW,” I say. He hooked up the hose for me. I’m thrilled I have the set-up ready: I can now move the female stingray in and take care of her, so she gets better.
The tank filled up, and I found some old pieces of plywood to create a makeshift lid—this tank would now have no window you could see in, and no transparent lid, either, which is one reason we normally didn’t favour it for holding fish. But it would do, to treat her wounds, and minimize the risk of her jumping out over the low lip of the tank.
Lee and I moved her into the freshly filled tank. I pulled the lids over, went back to the office for a moment, and ran into a few other staff members who were in an impromptu meeting about the new exhibits, and Dennis, the big boss, appeared to be soliciting ideas and discussing plans. This was a rare opportunity to offer input, so I sat down and started participating. Time flew. Before lunch, I went to check on the stingray. I usually would have been hovering around a new set-up, and observing the animal. But I’d gotten pulled into that impromptu exhibit meeting.
I lifted the lid, and the first thing I noticed was she was red. So red. TOO red.
And she wasn’t really moving. She wasn’t moving. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 62
Shit. Shit. What’s happening? I thrust my finger into the tank and into my mouth, tasting the water. I hadn’t done so earlier. Why would I? It was plumbed to
TFW, after all: that’s what I’d told Mark to do.
The water tasted salty. Salty like the ocean here. She was in pure saltwater— and for a long time. However long that stupid discussion was.
I knew I couldn’t fix this right away by myself. I ran to Lee’s office. “Lee. I need help. Right now. In the hallway.” He sensed my urgency, and we ran over.
“It’s saltwater,” I said, and I had no freshwater to pour on her, as it still had never actually been plumbed. Net her out, get her out, out of that deadly saltwater.
Getting buckets of freshwater. She’s so red.
After the initial frenzy of activity, Lee paused, standing there. We both realized she was as good as dead. Dying, I think, right before us.
I froze, stomach falling through my feet. I ran—to the dive room. The only and closest place I could hope to be alone. I wailed, a guttural “Noooooo…,” eyes tearing up, some fast sobs wracked me, but I knew I couldn’t cry then. I had to go back. I had to go back, and deal.
Somehow I pushed through the rest of the day. Gathered bags of ice, pushing them to the vet lab on a trolley, to put the female stingray’s body on, overnight, for tomorrow morning’s necropsy. Anyone I spoke to knew what had happened that day. “I killed her with saltwater,” I’d say. I killed her.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 63
Chapter 4: The Experience of Professional Aquarists
The aquarists I interviewed generously shared a wealth of experiences with me. These experiences ranged from their love of the work to their struggles with it, including traumatic events, disappointments, and ongoing frustrations. The stories they shared in some cases were from decades past, and in others, from the workday before we sat down for our interview. I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to interview them, and for how open and honest they were with me about their experiences.
I was drawn to this project and to interviewing my colleagues because I was struggling to make sense of my own experience working as an aquarist. I felt alone in trying to understand it: working as an aquarist is simply not a common profession, and I was plagued by the sense that my work experience and the lives of the animals we cared for had the potential to be much better. Having completed the interviews, I felt that I was holding my colleagues’ stories alongside mine and I felt less alone. The themes and narratives that emerged from the interviews felt at once intimately familiar and different. While each of the aquarists I interviewed had some remarkable similarities in their views, they also differed in how they negotiated and made sense of the challenges and dilemmas they encountered in their work.
With all the emotional complexity that working as a professional aquarist seems to involve, I humbly offer my attempt to give adequate voice to the multifaceted and individual work lives of the aquarists who shared their stories with me, knowing there is still more richness to the work than I can explore and synthesize within the scope of this project. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 64
The Participants
While it would be a pleasure to introduce the participants in detail, I am providing only abbreviated introductions in the interest of protecting their anonymity, as detailed in the research methodology chapter, because the pool of staff from which I recruited participants is very small.
The participants were a mix of women and men, and each had between 5 and 25 years of experience working at the Aquarium. Despite this, in many cases they identified similar issues, so I have chosen not to demarcate the participants in terms of their gender, age or work experience. Instead, I am introducing the participants below through their own words, and mini
“pen portraits ” inspired by Hollway and Jefferson (2000, p. 70), which in this case relay the participants’ respective relationships with their work, and their shared experience of affinity for the natural world. The following introductions are portions of what the participants shared in our first interviews, after I had asked them the SQUIN, “Please tell me the story of how you came to work at the Aquarium.”
Nathalie
On her first visit to the Aquarium, Nathalie was “wowed by the whole glossy cover of all the conservation work, all the breeding programs, and what it was doing and making an impact environmentally.” She then worked her way up in the organization through volunteering and other positions, until she landed her full-time aquarist job, saying “If I have to work, then I want to choose a job I love.” She recalls that it was surreal to hear the initial job offer, and she felt incredibly fortunate and lucky to be given the opportunity. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 65
Richard
Richard had initially planned a career in biology research, figuring that getting some experience at the Aquarium would help set him up for that. Before long, however, he found that
“it was so engrossing, taking care of the animals on a day-to-day basis, getting familiar with species you’ve never experienced before, learning like, the quirks, and personalities, as it is, of all the different types of animals, sort of things, that—not growing up with that—is so novel, so fascinating, and I realized I have no interest to go back to university or do any research at that point. I just wanted to be here, with the animals.”
Connor
Connor recalled an experience he had as a youngster, when he watched scuba divers getting into the water for a night dive. “I could see underwater, their lights moving around, and I was trying to imagine what it was like under there,” he said. He shared that he felt the ocean was
“a bit of black box,” and it was exciting to explore something unknown. Later, as an adult, through his biology connections, he “just stumbled upon the aquarium and then it just kind of went from there and I lucked into doing what I like best, working with fish and invertebrates… it turned into my dream job really, without even thinking about it. I was actually kind of lucky I stumbled into it.”
Lisa
For Lisa, her first trip resulted in an instant affinity. “We went to the wet lab with Andy
Lamb. I thought pfff , ‘I’m gonna be a marine biologist,’ just like that.”
“Just like that?” I asked. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 66
“Just like that,” she replied. “I had no doubt. And I had no idea what it really meant or what I had to do to get there. I just, knew, that, that’s my calling, so to speak. Not as dramatic as that but I just knew. And then I didn’t look back, that was it. It was just decided and I’m like, no,
I wanna do something with the ocean.”
Ian
Ian held a large snake at a zoo as a child, and the experience, along with his other critter collecting activities, planted the passion for future work: “I thought, wow this is fantastic, I wanna do this—and I thought this guy does this for a living, he does this every day, you know?”
When his parents took him to the Aquarium, he knew he wanted to try working there. “My parents had a hell of a time prying me out—getting me back out the door. You know, I just did not want to leave.” He worked his way up, and described his early years at the Aquarium as exciting, interesting, and with a real “wild West” feel to them.
A Framework for Investigating the Experience of the Aquarists
The psychoanalytically-informed research methodology produced wide-ranging and in- depth interviews, in which we explored the aquarist work experience. As such, there is more complexity and nuance than I can fully explore within the scope of this project. The analysis below focuses on the strongest themes that emerged, and the research questions guiding this study.
To facilitate my ability to address the research questions underpinning this project, and in keeping with the DRI 20 approach I employed, I frequently used prompts —open-ended questions
20 The Dialogic, Relational Interview technique developed by Lertzman (2015) BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 67
or reflections designed to stimulate reflection and free-association, as inspired by Hollway and
Jefferson (2000) and described in the research methodology chapter—as follow-ups to the
SQUIN. For example, after the aquarists had shared their stories about how they began working at the Aquarium, I often prompted the participants by inquiring if they might sense any change in how they felt about their work recently versus when they had started. This prompt, and others as discussed throughout the analysis, seemed to enable the aquarists to reflect on their relationship with their work, whether it had changed and how, and also seemed to open a space for the aquarists to discuss aspects of the work that felt difficult for them.
Throughout my analysis, I found it productive to distinguish between defense mechanisms, those unconsciously provoked reactions to anxiety, and coping strategies, as defined by Cramer (2006). Defense mechanisms tend to occur without conscious effort and without conscious awareness, while coping strategies are more purposeful conscious efforts with the intent of managing/problem-solving (Cramer, 2006). For simplicity, I have chosen to use the terms “defense mechanism” and “coping strategy” to differentiate between these two forms of defensiveness where appropriate. I observed what I thought might be examples of both of these ways of negotiating dilemmas, tensions, psychic pain, and anxiety, and viewed the aquarists’ experiences with that lens, to illustrate the unconscious and conscious complexity of their work.
Cramer (2006) says that both things are “aroused by situations involving psychological disequilibrium” (p. 8), and that their purpose is to decrease negative affect and return to baseline functioning as quickly as possible to manage situations. The aquarists have good reason to do just this, so that they stay functional and can care for the animals, which they seem to BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 68
consistently prioritize. Cramer goes on to say that sometimes coping strategies address the problem by “acting directly on the problematic situation” (p. 8) to reduce negative affect, whereas “defense mechanisms are focused on changing internal states, such as negative affect, rather than external reality” (p. 8) This interpretation seemed apt, and was fruitful when I applied it to analyzing the work experiences of the aquarists I interviewed.
In the narrative analysis that follows, I weave components from the interviews to tell a story about the aquarists and their experiences working at the Vancouver Aquarium. I identified three main themes that emerged across the participants:
• The responsibility, or cost, that goes with deep caring.
• Traumatic experiences throughout the course of their work.
• Chronic organizational and social stressors.
These themes reveal what lies beyond living the dream: the complexities of the aquarist work experience.
The Cost of Caring
In the following section, I explore the love for nature, work, and the animals that the aquarists I interviewed shared with me, along with aspects of their work that they found particularly rewarding or satisfying. I explore how devotion to the animals adds complexity and responsibility to the work experience, resulting in tensions they must negotiate, and how these factors may influence how the aquarists relate to their work. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 69
The Aquarium’s romantic charm.
All of the participants recalled their early years at the Aquarium with fondness, and often used the language of “dream job. ” A sense of romance was palpable as the aquarists spoke about the early times, and recalled the excitement just of being in the Aquarium and around the animals.
Throughout the interviews, participants often re-iterated how much they enjoyed the nature of the work of caring for animals. The work environment itself also seemed to hold a distinct appeal. I myself had grown up watching a show, Danger Bay ,21 about a family whose father was a veterinarian at the Vancouver Aquarium, so I was heartened to hear Lisa describe her early impression of the behind-the-scenes area at the Aquarium. Lisa was volunteering,
“doing an education for the kids thing. And I saw the aquarists in the food room and the ramp and you know. I was just like, ‘oh man, this is so cool, it’s like Danger Bay .’” She goes on to share that she was
… just hooked—I knew that’s what I wanted to do. And then when I actually got into
doing it and uh, volunteering with Judith, and I had to siphon 22 one of the tanks. And I
remember Greg coming up to me and saying, “So do you like this?” I’m like, “oh my
god, I could siphon all day!” Just, I love it, I can’t explain it. So anyway I was hooked.
21 Lisa and I discuss that “Danger Bay” may have been the best recruitment tool the Aquarium ever had, as it’s what got me onto a plane heading West, fresh out of Aquaculture college, for the promise of an interview at the Vancouver Aquarium. 22 To “siphon” is essentially a form of underwater vacuuming: a frequent cleaning task that risks becoming monotonous to some. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 70
She recalls that she knew it would work because she’d had pets her whole life. “I enjoyed it. And then, the smells of being in an aquarium with sea water, it’s just, it’s great. It’s a great feeling.”
Connor also recalled enjoying the general environment of the aquarium, saying:
Just to be in the building, taking visitors in the back or whatever. I think it’s kind of
exciting, it has a certain you know, almost romantic charm to it or something like that.
It’s, it’s kind of cool. Just the smell, the sounds of the water. You know. The just the look
of the place. So I, I always appreciated that kind of environment. And then, I’m not a sit-
down office guy. So it suited me, really well. And you’re kind of on your feet, you’re
moving around a lot.
Connor and Lisa both identified the smells of the sea water and characteristics of their work areas as something they appreciated and connected with. Unique experiences seemed to figure prominently for both of them as they recalled what they found meaningful about the work. For example, Connor spoke of his experiences collecting and seining for fish at the beach at night
(it’s best done during a certain tide), saying:
Well, I’d be down in there in January, December even, sometimes it’s December 23rd,
absolutely pouring rain, pitch black, windy, maybe slightly sleety snow, and you could be
down at the beach at low tide in the middle of downtown Vancouver going, ‘who else is
doing this right now?’ How cool is that, when you have a job where you can’t think of
anybody else doing it?
The adventure Connor experienced in his work seemed significant, and led him to reflect on his work favourably. Discussing overall work experience during our second interview, Connor said, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 71
“overall I think back and it was exciting, it was fun, it was unique. Those are all words I’d use to describe my job.”
Similarly, Lisa shared that her job at the Aquarium had been a “dream job” during her early days:
When I first came it was just all new and exciting, and I had such a great group of people
to work with. And uh, I couldn’t help but be excited. You know, great boss, great friends,
great everything. Diving all the time. It was like a dream job except low pay. It was a
dream job. And I could make that work.
Like Lisa and Connor, all of the aquarists shared happy memories of their early days at the
Aquarium and the excitement of the job. These memories and reflections seemed important to them as a way to stay connected with their early excitement about the work, even as we discussed some of the difficulties.
Passion for the work as resilience.
The curiosity, devotion and dedication the aquarists brought to their work was infused in every interview. At many turns, they described aspects of the work they loved, and re-iterated that it was a passion. Nathalie, for example, agreed with me that being an aquarist is not “just a job”:
Yeah. It’s a passion. You—yeah. You don’t do it unless you’re passionate about some
aspect of it. And it’s not the same aspect for everybody, but, whether you’re passionate
about animal care, or conservation, or whatever it is, they’re all kind of like in the same
realm. But you have no reason, or no business to do it, if you’re not, ’cause you could BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 72
just as easily go do something else, with less bullshit, less drama, better pay, like, all the
things that you want of a good job, you can get somewhere else. You would never do it if
you weren’t passionate about, I think, animals in general.
The way the Nathalie and the other aquarists discussed their passion for the work and their love of the animals suggest that these aspects of the job are a source of resilience, which may contribute to compassion satisfaction 23 .
Richard, for example, reflected on the attachments to certain animals that can form, even among groups of the same animal that aren’t easy to distinguish individually:
Like mudskippers, or something you love, you love the one that you know always gets
fed first and everyone else gives them their way, but then once they have had a few
pieces then all the other ones start to come out more, and get a little bit more aggressive,
and yeah, it's interesting seeing that they all have their own little personalities. And again,
it’s not like they…care about you back in the same way a dog does. But you still, that
experience of like being able to identify an animal and recognize that like, it’s
recognizing you on some level…
Observing the behaviour of the mudskippers and feeling a sense of connection with them seemed to be a source of gratification for Richard. Ian, on the other hand, seemed to deeply enjoy facilitating curiosity in new staff members by sharing exciting aspects of the animals’ biology:
23 Figley and Roop (2006) define compassion satisfaction as “a sense of fulfillment or gratification from the work” (p. 13). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 73
I was taking her through all these different things and she’s never done this before or
she’s interested in marine mammals and stuff like that I was like oh well, we’ll cure you
of that. 24 [laughter ] So, she’s been quite fascinated, she's like, oh wow, that’s cool and
you know, I took the time to actually take one of the zoea 25 from the crabs and put it
under the microscope and so she was looking at that, and she was like, “wow that’s really
a cool-looking creature.” And if you’ve never seen them before they are like really cool
creatures. Yeah, so there’s—so there’s all these little things I think which make the job
interesting and, you know, and exciting and worthwhile.
Like Ian, Connor reflected on the excitement of discovery, saying that this aspect of the work was something that kept his “juices flowing,” saying that gaining knowledge from his experiences and his observations while diving,
…does make the job interesting, as I was talking about, getting excited about stuff, you
know, having a warbonnet lay its eggs, on a little fake sponge you put there, because you
saw a warbonnet lay eggs in a sponge diving once, so you put it in, and they do it, like,
right away.
These statements suggest that the caretaking work itself was a source of fulfillment for the aquarists. Lisa had been sharing some of the challenges she experienced with politics in the
24 The aquarists at the Vancouver Aquarium (myself included) often had an attitude that the organisms we take care of are cooler or more interesting than the “charismatic megafauna,” otherwise known as the whales. 25 Zoea are one of the larval stages of crustaceans such as crabs. Zoea are radically different in both appearance and behavior from their eventual adult form. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 74
organization. When I asked if she felt the caretaking work itself carried her through some of the difficulties she experienced in the work, she agreed:
Oh, it definitely does. One hundred per cent. Like the, the work itself has remained the
same, from when I first started. I still love siphoning. I still love watching the fish and
looking at their behaviour. Like that’s definitely what I love to do, one hundred per cent.
It’s just being clouded more by my awareness of the politics that goes on, that I didn’t
really pay attention to because I was just so enamoured with the job.
It seems that until Lisa became more aware of the political environment in which she was working, the work itself was enough to fulfill her. These changes in perception the aquarists experienced are the focus of the following section.
The honeymoon is over.
I perceived a tension in the discussions when the aquarists at times contrasted their enjoyment of the work and its less appealing realities. In response to the prompt, “if you reflect for a moment about how you may have felt about your work at that time, or when you first started out, and then how you feel about it now, can you sense if that might have changed?” most participants did identify ways their relationship with the work changed over time, from the initial
“charmed ” atmosphere and excitement of the early days. Nathalie, for example, responded emphatically when I asked:
Oh, yeah . [ Laughs ] Like, a hundred per cent change. For sure. Um… I don’t think that
the work became any less cool, or meaningful, but I think that all the other bullshit, like,
took away from it, is probably the simplest terms. I think, when you’re new, it’s like, all BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 75
new and exciting, and overwhelming, but in a good way. And, you’re just like naïve, and
you don’t know about all the drama and bullshit and personalities and what’s going on
behind closed doors and behind the scenes and, I think just basically like—and you see it
in people—the longer you’re there, the more it just like, chips away, and starts to take
over and you see it—like, I saw it in me, and then I think I actually used to talk that, as
kind of why we would get so much turnover, after like, two years, was kind of like this
mark, where people came in, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then, they slowly start
to see all the other crap you had to deal with in order to stay employed, or stay sane.
Nathalie seems to be observing that her relationship with her work had changed mainly due to externalities: “what’s going on behind closed doors”, the “drama” and “personalities”. She was careful to note that while the aquarist work itself was still “meaningful”, these externalities “took away from it”. She felt these things also impacted other new staff members after about two years, contributing to problems with employee retention. It seems that new aquarists start out loving the work, but their experience of the job changes as they are exposed to interpersonal conflict and aspects of the organization that seem dysfunctional.
When Nathalie referred to her first visit to the Aquarium, she recalled being impressed by a looping video about the science and conservation angles of wolf eel aquaculture.26 She then said that after a couple of years standing in that area and working, her perspective had changed.
I was like, “shut that thing off!” [ Laughs ] But that’s what’s crazy to me, that’s the same
video! [Laughs] It’s just like, the perspective, a bunch of years later is hilarious. Yeah,
26 That is, raising them as food animals, rather than fishing them from the wild. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 76
but yeah it’s like, I never knew that kind of thing was happening, and so to walk in, and
see all that stuff, and hear those stories, it’s like, “oh wow, I wanna be a part of this”—
and then you learn that, hmm, actually those wolf eels are just sitting in West Vancouver,
and we’re probably just going to kill them all, and they never went anywhere—[voice
lowers, she trails off ]… It’s like—ohhh—there’s the nice glossy what you’re telling
people, and what you’re putting out there to the world, and then there’s like, you stay
long enough, and you actually get the behind the scenes, oh like, oh, no, this is what’s
actually happening, and it’s like, so disheartening.
The change in Nathalie’s perception of the video seemed representative of what I heard from the other aquarists, in that there was a disjunct between what the Aquarium seemed like from the outside—either from their early experiences or from the Aquarium’s messaging—and what the realities were. I shared in what I sensed was Nathalie’s bitter disappointment—that the
Aquarium’s actions didn’t seem to be in line with what they advertised. It seemed that her dream of working with a conservation organization was dashed by learning about what was “actually happening”, suggesting a loss of trust in the organization as well as the loss of her idealized job.
For some participants, it was the politics within the organization that seemed to gradually encroach on their initial sense of romance about their work. Lisa had described it as a “dream job” when she spoke of the early days. When I asked her if she would still describe it that way, she said:
No. I don’t think so. I mean, if I have to you know, obviously if you have to work, it’s,
it’s I, I like doing it. I don’t mind doing it. Uh, do I love it? No, I don’t think I do, based BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 77
on you know, all the politics and the angle the Aquarium’s going. They kind of lost me
on that aspect.
I asked Lisa to explain more about how she felt the politics were affecting the way she related to her work. She talked about initially feeling separate from any management influence, saying
“you’ve got to shield yourself from the higher ups and all that stuff brought on to you,” but that as she became more involved with and committed to different projects, those realities intruded nevertheless. She said:
We got our hopes up on an Australia expansion and then didn’t go through and, stuff like
that. You just kind of roll with it and you’re part of the group and not taking it directly,
but once you get committed to something and you’re working and then all of a sudden
they cancel something or—then it’s like wait, but that’s, that’s my dream. What are you
doing? They’re squashing it so.
Lisa’s use of the word “squashing” to describe what she felt the organization did to her dream when they cancelled the Australia expansion to suggests a loss of her dream—much as Nathalie seemed to experience— and a sense of significant disappointment around the organization’s decisions.
The changes recounted in how the aquarists related to their work over time seemed to have multiple influences, including frustration with interpersonal conflicts, disappointment with exhibit plans being cancelled, and the observation that what the Aquarium advertised was quite different from what was actually taking place—in short, its management and organizational culture. While these influences seemed to result in sadness or disappointment about the BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 78
Aquarium’s realities puncturing their early dreams, the aquarists rarely complained about the animal caretaking work—their main responsibility. Rather, I sensed that the aquarists were concerned with portraying how much they did love the work, as if to either convince me, or to counter or otherwise “repair” things they had spoken about that might seem disappointing, frustrating, or otherwise psychically painful.
Ian, for example, seemed to be trying to balance disappointment and frustration about the aquarium, with positive aspects of the work. For example, immediately after telling me how he had enjoyed showing the crab zoea to the new employee, he said,
But you always—but again then you come home and like, oh here I am in my little you
know five hundred square foot apartment. And not making enough money to really do
what I really wanna do. Like, travel and all those other different things. So, it is kind of—
it’s always—it’s that life/work balance that’s really hard to come up with although I think
I would rather be doing a job that I really love than doing a job that I hated but making
really big money, you know.
In this statement, Ian seems to “repair” his initial expression of disappointment by emphasizing the positive. Despite the financial and work/life balance challenges he encountered by working as an aquarist, he seems to rely on his professed love of the work to justify his choice to remain as an aquarist. This tension between the difficult aspects of the work and the love of the work suggested that Ian harboured ambivalent, or at least complicated feelings about his work as an aquarist. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 79
Along these same lines, after Nathalie and I had discussed her frustration with interpersonal conflicts and how it had negatively affected her enjoyment of the job, I prompted her by asking “so, if I said to you ‘the aquarium can be a complicated place to work’—how might that resonate with you?” She was emphatic in her agreement with this, saying,
Complicated?” Yes! It’s very complicated! I don’t even understand it, like, I don’t even
understand, psychologically, like, what it was doing, or not doing—or, how to explain,
like, that duplicity, of like those two worlds, like the world that hates it, and the world
that loves it... I do joke and say that the aquarium was like my biggest love-hate
relationship, because there’s so many aspects to it that I love so much, and there’s so
many that I hate so much, and it’s—it’s so weird, to feel that way.
The Aquarium as a “love-hate relationship” for Nathalie suggests that she holds contradictory or conflicted feelings about her work— ambivalence—similar to how Ian appeared conflicted in how he related to his work. Lertzman (2015) writes that ambivalence is
“psychoanalytically conceptualized as simultaneously holding competing affective investments”
(p. 107), analogous to Nathalie’s expression of the Aquarium as a “love-hate” relationship.
Navigating tensions between feelings of disaffection and cynicism, and their love of the work and the dream of what it could be, may manifest in these attempts to balance, or “repair” the views they held of their relationship with the Aquarium.
Ambivalence in how the aquarists spoke about their work—they often vacillated between sharing the distressing or stressful aspects and emphasizing the positive—points to a reluctance or inability to acknowledge a source of distress or disappointment (Lertzman, 2015). The BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 80
participants’ experiences of ambivalence, as we explore throughout the analysis, offer opportunities to better understand the complexity in how they relate to their work. Unlike the simplistic conception of working as an aquarist as a “dream job”, the reality is indeed more nuanced, and rife with complex ethical and affective dimensions which may be a source of stress for the aquarists. The work experience of aquarists can be complex for many reasons, not the least of which is the responsibility that comes with caring for animals, the focus of the following section.
“You’re the bulwark against failure”: the weight of responsibility.
The participants consistently reported experiencing a meaningful relationship with their work, ranging from their desire to contribute to conservation, their excitement at having a unique job, their passion for the caretaking work itself, and the joy of working with the animals.
However, meaningful work can be a double-edged sword (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009) – a flip side to the great reward and meaning the aquarists can experience in their work, is the great responsibility that comes with caring for animals, especially those whose lives are closely associated with the proper functioning of mechanical systems.
Although the aquarists are not considered to be “on call”, if anything goes wrong in the tanks they’re responsible for, they will be the ones who will have to fix it, no matter the time of day. Ian, for example, stayed late to monitor a temperature on a malfunctioning life support system: BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 81
I stayed an hour late to make sure the temperature was coming down because if the
temperature is not coming down and something goes wrong I’m the one who gets the call
at two o'clock in the morning to go in.
The level of vigilance and responsibility Ian expressed seemed to be common among the participants. The understanding of their role as a “bulwark against failure”, as Richard put it, seemed inherent to the job. As Richard reflected on the level of responsibility he felt around his work, he said:
I feel that coming to the aquarium where every day you've got like hundreds of animals
where you are the thing standing between them and, like, suffering and misery—that's a
lot of responsibility, and all it takes is to, to be on the wrong side of that equation once or
twice and—[Laughs ]—you know definitely dispels you of any notion that you can afford
to take breaks or take it easy.
In our second interview, I followed up on this theme:
J: You said you're standing between all these animals and potentially bad things
happening to them. Like, your care, your intervention, your noticing—and so much of
their well-being then relies on you, being there and being vigilant and aware and having
the time to do so.
R: [ Inhales ] Yeah and that's actually really tough. That's one of the other things that,
again maybe I should be better at it than I am, but you know every day that I stay up later
than I should and I'm super tired and groggy the next morning, that is technically
irresponsible because that's when accidents are gonna happen, that’s when yeah hundreds BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 82
of lives are literally at stake just because I didn't want to stop watching a TV show or
something and uh—definitely have to get better about treating this as yeah not just
something you go into eight to four no matter what your state is and um, it can be really
tough to balance that and again not get overwhelmed with it too because you do have a
life outside of work and again, other commitments beyond just within the walls of the
aquarium so—it can be a tough balance for sure and I get why, again as in other care
fields it can burn people out.
Richard seemed to be taking personal responsibility for avoiding mistakes, verbalizing his ambition to be better rested and thus more vigilant. He shared how maintaining a work-life balance was difficult, seemingly because of the level of vigilance he finds is required of him to do his work well—that “hundreds of lives are at stake” and he doesn’t want to be “on the wrong side of that equation”.
As Richard’s words begin to demonstrate, aquarists’ work involves vigilance, duty, and sacrifice, mirroring the work experience of the zookeepers Bunderson and Thompson (2009) interviewed. The aquarists have a sense of duty and a strong desire to always do well by the animals, often making personal sacrifices to do so. I asked Nathalie if she could recall any experiences where she was worried about a life support system, sharing that I had found I’d often end up staying late to check on things, or coming back in:
N: Oh, yeah, it was constant. Like, I, off the top of my head I don’t have a specific one,
but, it was like, as soon as something—whether it’s true or not—looks, or feels off—I
think, yeah, you carry that worry. Because you don’t—it’s—well, for one, it’s like, your BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 83
collection, and you’re responsible, but also, I think it depends how seriously you take,
like, that life. Those are still living creatures that are completely dependent on our care,
and then especially for me, that’s always been the root of being vegan, is, like, I don’t
wanna take life [ laughs ] so, if I don’t wanna take life for the idea of consumption, I
definitely don’t wanna take it, or have anything to do with it, when it’s my own
responsibility for doing my job properly. So yeah, there’s lots of times where I’d stay
late, or worry, or, go home and probably once or twice drive back to the aquarium, late at
night, to go make sure you shut that valve off or turned that valve on, or whatever. Like,
not a lot—usually talk myself down—oh, but sending a text or a call to someone you
knew that was still there, actually—
J: Yeah
N: —more than half a dozen times [ laughs ]
J: [ laughs ]
N: ‘Hey can you run down and check and make sure I shut this off, or whatever…’
J: Yeah.
N: So yeah you do like really take it to heart and take it personally, like you feel
personally responsible, whether you’re supposed to or not, I don’t think it even matters.
They could tell you one or the other and it still wouldn’t matter. I think like, that’s just
like the nature of like being invested in caring. And then yeah, you have like had enough
weird fishy nightmares, of like, slowly, things going down drains, and be like BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 84
‘nooooooo!’ and—[laughs]—and—yeah. Not a lot, but a few. I don’t know what those
mean.
Nathalie seems to imply that whether or not the organization wanted you to feel personally responsible, it is something inherent to the caretaking work. Like Richard, she takes the responsibility of the lives depending on her very seriously. She recounts worrying enough about whether she’d missed something that she’d returned to the Aquarium late at night. Connor, as well, reflects this:
A couple of times I, you know, woke up at 2 in the morning and go, “oh my god, did I
turn that tank back on?” And drove all the way in to work at 2 in the morning to [laughs]
make sure it was on.
Both Nathalie and Connor shared that they worried about the animals and life support systems even when they were off-duty. This sense of responsibility was also apparent as Lisa described the extra effort she puts in. While Lisa expresses confidence in her abilities, she still has conflicts with where she draws her line for finishing and leaving work at the end of the day:
I know what to do now like to take care of them, and I know what to look for in their
behavior changes and everything. I think that I’m confident that what I’m doing is good.
It’s not killing anything. So, other than the few things that I’ve let slip because I’m too
busy right now. Those—those hurt for sure. That I don’t think it’s—you know it used to
stress me out because I would never be able to get anything complete that I wanted to. I
always do what I can for animal care. Like I would never leave at the end of my day, and BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 85
to be like “oh yeah I forgot to siphon those tanks, oh they’re going to die.” Like, I would
always go and siphon it.
That Lisa says she would always choose to stay late and would never leave the animals uncared for in order for her to leave on time speaks to commitment and the level of sacrifice the aquarists are willing to undertake to do well by the animals. She says she acknowledges that despite trying, she’ll never leave on time, and her family knows this. “I make Trevor realise, I’m never gonna leave right at four. Because I’m always gonna do that, ‘oh maybe just one more water change.’” I responded that to me it seemed like the nature of the work, and she agreed, continuing,
So I’m always doing my—my best so I feel like I can leave and I’m not burdened by
what I didn’t get done and I leave what isn’t getting done, like, cleaning, you know, the
glass in the reserve tanks. I definitely prioritize and make the animals the number one.
And then feel confident—and then I also have a lot of help you know. I have volunteers,
specifically, and it helps that I’m sharing it with Nick, so, that takes it off. I mean
sometimes I get totally overwhelmed. But I just have to take a breath and do the best I
can for them and leave everything else behind. There’s just not enough hours in the day.
It’s overwhelming. But I bet you can say that with pretty much every job.
There appears to be tension, or ambivalence, in the way Lisa vacillated between sharing a sense of overwhelm, and trying to “play down” the significant responsibility she feels. It seemed she was avoiding recognizing that her job as an aquarist involved a significant level of BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 86
responsibility—that was causing her some stress—by mentioning all the help she has, and saying every other job is probably like that.
A sense of continual responsibility was evident among all the participants, illustrating further parallels with nursing work, which Menzies Lyth (1960) found “tends to evoke a strong sense of responsibility in the nurses, who often discharge their duties at considerable personal cost” (p. 104). Richard, for example, shared how his sense of responsibility was constant, and followed him home: “When you're prioritizing their needs it just becomes second nature to always be thinking about that, because you are for most of the day anyways now, so when you come home, that part of your brain doesn't switch off anymore.” When Richard says that part of his brain “doesn’t switch off anymore”, it suggests a kind of sustained professional vigilance, which Meyer and Lavin (2005) claim is characteristic of nursing work, stating that “professional vigilance is the essence of caring in nurses.” I inquired whether that level of vigilance ever led to him to worry that he may have forgotten something. He reflected that while he was quite diligent about checking his work, he worries every day, regardless:
Did I do enough? Like should I—I know I won't get paid overtime for it because it
definitely wouldn't have been approved if I’d asked, but should I stay the extra half hour
to go over the food cultures one last time and change the ones that are starting to
decompose? Like in, you know, in my day as I'm going around I think no, that's
something that will have to wait until tomorrow, and every time I make that choice I'm—
not that it, you know—it's probably over the top to say I die a bit inside but I think every
day, I leave feeling a little upset that I didn't do enough. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 87
Richard appears to suffer every time he has to leave things unfinished, which he implies is a daily occurrence. This suggests he may be experiencing moral distress—an experience known from both the nursing and veterinary care fields (Crane, Phillips, & Karin, 2015; Kahler, 2015;
Mänttäri ‐van der Kuip, 2016; Rollin, 2011; Wagner, 2015; Wallis, 2015)—which can occur when a person’s moral integrity is compromised, sometimes because they feel unable to act in alignment with their core values and obligations (Wallis, 2015). Like Richard, the other participants expressed a sense that not only did they rarely leave work feeling fully satisfied with what they’d accomplished, but in some cases they had a strong sense of guilt. Each incident of experiencing moral distress can leave behind moral residue , a “feeling of having compromised one’s values that lingers” (Wallis, 2015, p. 19). If the situation occurs repeatedly, as it seems to for Richard and some of the other participants, the “residue” may increase, and lead to a breaking point (Epstein & Hamric, 2009; Wallis, 2015).
Ian, for example, discussing how short-staffed and busy he was feeling during the time of our interview, said he was always “scrambling around like a mad man to try and get things done.” He also felt guilty leaving if everything hadn’t been done to his satisfaction:
I feel guilty if I leave because it’s like I—I—I don’t wanna leave the animals like that.
It’s like I can’t feed animals without first siphoning the tank because otherwise they eat
their own shit. I mean right? Who does that? But we’re kind of almost expected to leave
things. And I don’t wanna leave things, so I get stressed out. So um, yeah. And so it’s
frustrating, it’s still extremely rewarding to some extent because I’m breeding sea
cucumbers and I’ve got snails and I’ve got little fishies and I’ve got you know, I’ve got a BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 88
whole bunch of things happening but it’s like, people, you know, I’ve got things
happening here, I need help .
Despite expressing guilt and frustration at his sense that he can’t provide the level of care he wants to, Ian again seems to be trying to “repair” this frustration by immediately talking about the rewarding aspects of the work. This sudden reversal suggests a defensive desire to avoid recognizing the acute psychic pain he expresses when he says, “who does that?” It appears that
Ian desperately doesn’t want to be the kind of person who “does that”, but that he is caught in a difficult position because he believes he must be expected to leave the animals like that, else he would be given enough time to care for them in the way he feels is right. When Ian says “I don’t want to leave the animals like that”, he seems to be expressing a sense of moral distress. Ian’s inability to practice his profession the way he would like to according to his personal and professional moral code may result in an emotional burden, and according to Mänttäri ‐van der
Kuip (2016) who studied front-line social workers, is associated, along with perceived resource insufficiency, with experiences of moral distress.
Experiences of moral distress appear to be a regular feature in the work lives of my participants, and this distress may contribute to compassion fatigue 27 or be an overall contributor to the general stress experienced by the aquarists. The participants never seemed to feel they could achieve everything they wanted to by the end of the work day. Aquarists faced similar stressful situations to those encountered by the oncology nurses studied by de Carvalho et al.
27 Compassion fatigue is regarded as a form of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder (Figley, 2002; Huggard & Huggard, 2008; Lloyd & Campion, 2017). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 89
(2005), which included feeling that they couldn’t get all their work done, inadequate staffing and being unable to get caught up, all of which were found to contribute to burnout. The ongoing work situation in which the aquarists find themselves overwhelmed and unable to finish everything to their satisfaction without staying late may interfere with their ability to experience compassion satisfaction or a sense of work fulfillment. As Nathalie put it, a conscientious aquarist is someone who has “the eagerness, and is willing to do what’s right for the animal, at the end of the day, no matter the cost.” Indeed, caring for animals can come at a cost, and leave aquarists vulnerable to experiencing trauma in the course of their daily work, the focus of the following section.
“It’s just non-stop deaths that you’ve been a part of”: The Aquarists’ Everyday Trauma
As we've been exploring, there are many complicated dimensions to this line of work, ranging from excitement about the Aquarium to disillusionment, and from passion for the work to feeling overwhelmed and frustrated by the intense responsibility. Now, we explore the traumatic aspects of this work, which may contribute to experiences of moral distress and guilt.
In the following section, we explore how the aquarists negotiate these difficult experiences, while needing to stay functional in the interest of their work.
I often shared my own traumatic experiences, particularly the story about the female stingray 28 with the participants, in the interest of relaying my own mistakes and vulnerability to learn more about theirs. I view these incidents as sources of primary trauma , as contrasted with secondary trauma. The distinction between the two is somewhat ambiguous in this situation,
28 Included as an interlude prior to Chapter 4. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 90
however, people can be traumatized either directly—as in primary trauma—or indirectly (Figley
& Roop, 2006). Secondary trauma is considered an indirect route to trauma: it can be experienced by others who learn about the primary trauma, such as a car accident, or abuse experienced by loved ones (Figley & Roop, 2006), or, for example, in the context of the veterinary profession, in bearing witness to and needing to relieve the suffering of others (Lloyd
& Campion, 2017). While aquarists don’t deal with distraught pet owners, they do sometimes witness the suffering of the animals in their care when deaths occur, or when treating wounds or other illnesses. Attempting to understand the types of traumatic situations aquarists may be experiencing is useful in how it may inform strategies for their support, a topic I will explore in the Discussion chapter. While I primarily experienced the loss of the female stingray as directly traumatic, there was a component of being empathetic to the stingray’s suffering too: it still makes me sick to envision how red and stiff she was as she died before us, knowing that she had been trapped in saltwater with no way to get out, save my noticing.
The aquarists often used the term “trauma” or “traumatic” to describe experiences they shared. They must, as a matter of course in their work, negotiate the difficult ground between being deeply invested in caring for their charges, while frequently facing their deaths from accidents, mistakes, disease and natural causes. They are also involved in acquiring animals for the Aquarium, which appeared to provoke complicated feelings in the participants. The resultant
“psychological disequilibrium”, and the need to decrease anxiety and other “disruptive negative affect, so as to restore a comfortable level of functioning” (Cramer, 2006, p. 8) appeared to BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 91
frequently arouse forms of defensiveness and to weigh heavily on the aquarists, as described in the following sections.
Accidents, mistakes, and near misses.
“You need to realize that you’re holding a life in your hand. And how can you live
with—with yourself if, you know—like, bad experiences will traumatize you forever.”
Lisa was sharing what she thinks makes a good aquarist. She was upset about the cavalier way she had seen colleagues acting during some seining events, saying she took it personally upon herself to make sure all the animals who came up in the net got into water as quickly as possible, even when others didn’t seem to hurry the same way. When I inquired if there were specific bad experiences she was referring to, she shared the following story that happened when she was new in her career, and someone senior to her had pointed out a moray eel that seemed to be in distress in a display. She recounted that she asked colleagues for advice and had been given the green light to move the eel, with the caveat that she ensure it have a “a really solid, heavy cover because they can jump.” Along with a colleague, she pulled the eel out and set it up in a reserve
(behind-the-scenes) holding tank.
And I remember staying ’til like 5, on my own time, making sure it was ok and breathing
well, the airline, everything was sealed. There’s no way it could jump, the light, it was
dimmed. And wrote all the notes as precise as I could and walked away. And the next
morning I walked in and Mitch’s like, who’s hallway it was. And he’s like, “I need you
to come with me” and Mitch was, that was very rare that he was that serious. And I
walked in and the moray eel was laying on the floor. And I was like, “oh my god what BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 92
happened?” And he’s like, “it jumped.” And I was like, “no, no, I made sure the cover
was completely covering.” And he’s like, “there was one inch.”
Lisa continued, explaining that there was a tiny gap since the lids hadn’t specifically been designed for the tank she ended up putting it on:
That little, tiny little gap that there’s no way. Like we didn’t have anything designed for
it. So it’s not like I put the wrong lid on. But it must have been startled by night staff or
someone flicking on the lights. And it jumped out. And it died a horrible death on the
floor. And it was like, six foot long, beautiful pair of moray eels. And I pulled one of
them out—and he made me cut it up. With a hack saw. On the floor, while I was bawling,
cutting up this beautiful fish because he’s like, it—we didn’t have a garburator. So he’s
like, “it’s gotta go in organics but you can’t dispose of, a big fish like this.” So I had to sit
there and cut it up and I was so unhappy and then he turns to me at the end and he’s like,
“now you’ve learned your lesson.” And walked away. And I was like, “ahhh!” (pained
crying sound)
Lisa describes this difficult experience, which happened when she was only a month into the job, as “brutal” and said she’s “never gonna forget that.” She said that now:
Whenever I’m training my Wexers 29 or new staff, I’m like, check your gutters, make
sure your lids are on, don’t make moves without talking. Get one of the seniors to come
over and check what you’re doing, just to make sure, ’cause you don’t want that on your
conscience ’cause it’s gonna haunt you forever.
29 Work experience students who come from high schools to get job experience BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 93
It seems that the way Lisa made sense of this incident, and attempted to “repair” that early mistake she had made, was to focus strongly on explaining to other staff and her students how to avoid making a similar mistake. And it did seem that Lisa was “haunted” by this incident, as she continued to mentally work through how it shouldn’t have been possible for it to happen:
I never, to this day, I’m still like how on earth did a big, huge moray eel get enough
strength—and it was a weighted lid. I had weights on it, dive weights on it. And it was
one with the, you know, it’s got like the—the heavy built into it. Like, the fibreglass on
top. Like it was a heavy-duty lid, with blacked-out chloroplast, stitched in. Like it was a
big deal. And, and Mitch is like “yeah, those are extremely powerful fish,” and I would
never have known.
After Lisa shared this story with me, I reciprocated, sharing my story of killing the female stingray with her. She empathized with how upset I was about the experience and reflected along with me about the difficulty of grieving the animal yet having to do a necropsy or prepare the body for disposal.
L: And then you live with it. ’cause it’s not as if you broke a glass. You—you know, an
animal is now gone. I know, it’s brutal. It’s a hard weight to bear, is what we do. I mean,
it could be so rewarding but it could be so devastating.
J: Yeah it’s really both, all—all at the same time, I feel.
L: Mm-hm.
J: And then yeah, the next—I was really upset about it, but I just had to deal— I ran into
the dive room and just, was like, oh my god, kind of almost half sob and then run back BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 94
out—ok I can’t, it’s not cool to like get super upset about this right now, I just gotta like,
deal with it. Um. But yeah that night, I—I must have drank a whole bottle of wine. Just
brutal. Ah, and had to go in the next morning to do the necropsy. And it was, it’s so
strange to me, like that shift from, here’s this animal I’m caring for. And have spent years
hand feeding, and now I’m cutting them up.
L: Tell me about it. The hack saw man. Brutal. Brutal. And all I wanted to do was forget
it, and I couldn’t. I was reminded every time I saw that floorboard, going oh my god, I
just cut up a moray eel on there.
J: Wow.
L: Yeah. And then I had to bring out the bits and put them in the organics.
J: Yeah.
L: Yeah it’s definitely uh, you need a good balance of personal life to do this job. Either
you don’t have any, and you can just drink or you have like, friends and family and uh, a
balance. Because it’s too stressful, it’s too much. Or you can dissociate entirely, but you
still have to take care of the animals. It’s a very stressful job.
Lisa appeared to be sharing a potential defensive strategy of “dissociating,” or “detaching” after she recounted the trauma she experienced due to the eel’s death. Dissociation exists in degrees, and provides the ability to detach from adverse emotional states (Bowins, 2004). When Lisa offers that another option for coping with the stress and trauma she encountered might be “you can just drink”, it suggests that a form of emotional numbing is desirable to her. Dissociative experiences can take different forms, including emotional numbing—“diminishing or blocking BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 95
feelings that can interfere with functioning” (Bowins, 2004, p. 3). The defensive strategies Lisa shared appear to have the purpose of protecting her from the emotionally troubling aspects of the job. However, she also remarked that you still need to care for the animals, as if it isn’t as simple as just detaching, and that she appeared to desire a balance between some form of detachment— with the purpose of staying functional— and staying engaged and invested with caring for the animals. She relayed the lessons she learned from the moray eel incident and others:
L: I always double check. Everything. That’s my lesson I learned.
J: Double check everything.
L: Double check everything. Gutters, air, water, I do the same thing over and over. It’s
almost like I’m OCD. ’Cause I check everything. Because the last thing I wanna do is be
responsible for death. Because I walked away without checking something. So I’m like,
take the five minutes, do a tank check.
J: Yeah.
L: But sometimes I’ll be checking the room like, three times. And I’m like, what am I
doing? I can’t walk away, because I just can’t believe the fact that I can actually walk
away.
J: And if it’s four o’ clock and you haven’t done those, those checks—
L: I do them anyways, I stay.
J: Yeah, yeah. ’Cause you don’t want to take the chance.
L: I don’t want to walk away. Yeah. I don’t wanna take the chance and then you know,
people are like, uh, I don’t want to have to come in, in the middle of the night. And I’m BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 96
like, no I don’t want to kill something, and have that on my conscience, I already have
that with the moray eel. That’s enough.
Lisa’s strategy of double-checking everything seems to be a coping strategy—a conscious strategy for reacting to stressful or upsetting situations (Parker & Endler, 1996)— because it is a conscious attempt to solve a problem and reduce the anxiety she seems to have about leaving and perhaps missing something that could result in the death of an animal. This ritual of performing the “tank check”—even to excess, as she shares she almost can’t complete it—is reminiscent of the nurses in Menzies Lyth (1960), who attempted to eliminate decisions by “ritual task performance” (p. 103), much as Lisa described when she said “gutters, air, water, I do the same thing over and over”.
Menzies Lyth (1960) explains that the nurses’ ritual task-performance spares them anxiety consequent on decision-making that could affect the welfare of the patient by minimizing the “number and variety of decisions that must be made” (p. 103). It appears that the tank check as a ritual, or “defensive technique” (Menzies Lyth, 1960, p. 100) may function similarly for aquarists, by minimizing the number of decisions they need to make around whether they can leave at the end of the day with a clear conscience. Indeed, the tank check is one of the first things I learned as a new aquarist: that your most important job upon arriving in the morning and leaving at the end of the day is to check everything and make sure the systems are functioning, the exhibits are clean, and that there aren’t any mortalities or sick fish the public might see.
Richard also emphasized the importance of checking tanks to avoid mistakes, sharing his desire to communicate the importance of the procedure for new staff: BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 97
Why don't we learn from other people's mistakes? Why do we always seem to have to
make them ourselves? And because it's funny—everything that we've been talking about
today I try to instill in any—any new part-timer or anything, I try and say like I'll give
them the example. Like, I've killed animals by leaving, by not checking the temperature
and just relying on the heater. “When you set up a tank, check the temperature and make
sure the tank is appropriate before putting an animal in,” and they'll still make the
mistake.
The importance of the tank check to Richard, Lisa, and the other aquarists, and the way they focused on teaching it to new staff, suggests that it may be a “social” form of coping strategy, much as other forms of defensiveness can be locked into the social system in a workplace
(Hinshelwood & Skogstad, 2000), as tasks, rules, and procedures (Mawson, 2000).
During my second interview with Richard, he shared a particularly gut-wrenching story with me after I alluded to mistakes I had made 30 that I still carried with me:
There's probably a few defining ones in my moment, that I've tried to take as much as I
can from the experience as I can [ inhales, voice a bit shaky ] uh, because they were just so
hyper traumatic—I mean, I think one of them that first hit me the hardest when I was, uh,
I was still a part-timer, I'd only been there three or four months. I had just gotten trained
on the birds, and I was cleaning them and, uh—this is a mark of shame for me, but
[laughs ]—so, I was cleaning the birds downstairs and, uh, it was after four PM and
Melissa had already left for the day and, I was feeding the birds and I took a step back
30 Particularly the death of the female stingray, included as an Interlude between Chapters 3 and 4. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 98
after feeding and I stepped on something and I was like oh there's a piece of pineapple on
the floor or something… and it was like a freshly hatched baby bird but it was still just a
little alive [inhales ] and I panicked because it was late in the day, I didn't think to call vet
staff, I didn't know what to do, and I ended up just—putting it, still—moving a bit in the
compost with the rest of the food and throwing it out at the end of the day [ speaking more
quickly ] thinking like [ inhales ]—I don't know what else to do, oh my god, I didn't even
think to like humanely euthanize it, I—again I just wasn't thinking straight, I had been
there too little to develop a good sort of automatic response to that situation but, that
messed me up—and I made sure like, after that, like—that's not going to happen again,
like accidents'll happen and yeah—animals might become injured under my care for
whatever reason, but there are better responses than that to dealing with it and yeah I've
tried to be a lot better about that ever since, ’cause that's all it takes is an experience like
that and you definitely don't want to have that feeling again.
Richard felt he hadn’t developed a good “automatic response” to this situation. Bowins (2004) states that “people who deal efficiently with emergency situations typically learn to diminish or block feelings of fear/anxiety and sadness, because the excessively intense emotions that often arise in this type of setting can interfere with the performance of their work” (p. 3). The situation
Richard described seems to qualify as an emergency, and he shared that he reacted emotionally and “wasn’t thinking straight”. I tried to empathize with him, saying “how could you really prevent it, you just moved in a certain way,” and he clarified what he meant by a good
“automatic response”: BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 99
But the response to it is what failed, so yeah to—learning at least that much like it doesn't
matter what hour it is, call the vet staff if the vet staff are away, you know—you—again I
didn't know at the time, but you learn to call security. Get them to get you into the vet
office and throw in some TMS 31 or whatever like, you know there’s little things you can
do, or—put it in a paper towel and drop something heavy on it. I've had to do that for a
gecko once after—it's the same thing, I just shifted my movement not realizing a gecko
had gotten out and when I moved my foot I noticed that yeah there was a gecko on the
floor with its skin partly peeled back—but by then I had learned better and it was yeah—
instant response was quick and you know it suffered hopefully only for a matter of
seconds before I was able to euthanize it, like, right on the spot, but yeah—it's tragic.
I responded, “that’s not easy to do either, having to—finish the job,” and Richard said:
Yeah, again it's sort of sad to—like, it's hard to bring yourself to do but you have to
recognize that it's still preferable to letting something suffer and again I learned that the
hard way very early on, I mean better then than later, but it—yeah. I'll never forget that.
In keeping with Bowin’s observations (2004), it appeared that as Richard gained job experience, he learned to “block” a little more of his initial emotional reaction to animal accidents and emergencies, allowing him to respond rapidly and in a manner that he felt was morally defensible, unlike his first such experience, which he referred to as a “mark of shame”.
Richard’s stories made me think back to more of my own traumatic experiences, like arriving early to find that the piranhas had half-eaten another piranha overnight. Seeing the
31 A common agent used for humane euthanasia. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 100
piranha gasp with the back half of its body gnawed away in massive chunks spurred me to immediate action. I knew I had to euthanize the fish as quickly as possible, and there were no veterinary staff available yet. I took a fish club 32 and started whacking the piranha on its head— having honed my technique during my Northern Tilapia days 33 . It felt at once totally necessary and therefore kind, and absolutely brutal and violent, since I had been caring for these fish for years by this point. And I would be hard-pressed to list all of the times I had accidentally stepped on a still-alive fish who had jumped out of a tank, and my gasping in horror as I realized what that feeling under my foot had been.
When I asked Nathalie about whether she could recall mistakes she may have made, she told me about having done filter maintenance on some huge lionfish that were being held behind the scenes while their exhibit was re-worked. She recalled being quite busy and deciding to do a big water change on their tank, but she had stepped away and gotten involved in something else.
“Yeah—totally came back when someone came and found me and was like ‘there’s no water—
’” She was beside herself:
N: Holy fuck. I ran in upper quarantine, I almost threw up. I looked, and I saw eight
lionfish and no water, and was like, I literally almost barfed. Cranked the water, ran into
the bathroom, and was like, dry-heaving [ laughs ]—like at the sink, being like “holy fuck,
holy fuck”—oh, it was right before the expansion—
32 Plastic fish clubs are sold for “bonking” fish to quickly kill them, and I had inherited one when I took responsibility for the freshwater section. 33 The Northern Tilapia story—“The finer points of euthanasia by hammer” is included as an Interlude between chapters 2 & 3. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 101
J: Oh, wow—
N: And they were about to go back on exhibit, too, so there’s all the pressure of that
being the lionfish exhibit. It’s all re-done, the labels are already up, so not only like, the
guilt of like, killing animals, but the pressure of like, fucking up right before the
expansion, that opens—
She says she was “blasting the water,” stressing about what she would tell her boss, and alternating between going to the bathroom, thinking, “’oh my god, I’m going to be sick’” and pacing about watching the tank refill. “Sure enough, as soon as they were swimming on their sides, as soon as there was enough water, they all righted themselves… and like, they all survived—but—I never walked away from a backwash, ever again.”
Nathalie described the weight of this near miss using the same language as Lisa, saying
“Yeah, that shit haunts you,” and “you care, they’re your animals, that you’re responsible for, and they are one hundred per cent reliant on your care. So that’s on you.” Reflecting on how she changed the rules for her own work as a result of this incident, Nathalie said:
Everyone says that—like, “oh, you should never do this, never do that,” and I feel like
that’s all well and good to say, until you teach yourself that lesson, then you’re like—
then you’re the person that’s like “never walk away!” [ laughs ] Then you’re telling other
people that, but—yeah—[pause ] So you know, you do, you make mistakes, and, you own
them. But, hopefully, you learn from them. Especially because yeah, when you’re
invested? And you care about those animals? Then yeah, you run to the bathroom, and
almost barf. [ laughs ] So, I don’t know if everyone else would have done that, but I felt— BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 102
sick. Like, I’ll never forget walking in there, and just feeling like, so sick, and so guilty.
Thinking that “oh my god, they might die because I did this to them.”
Nathalie, like Lisa and Richard, reacted to experiencing a traumatic event and feelings of guilt by doubling down on the importance of the rules and procedures she had initially learned, and emphasizing their importance to new staff.
The aquarists seemed to rely on coping strategies that became social in nature: the tank check seemed crucial as a ritual, or procedure to prevent mistakes, and they all discussed placing a high importance on communicating their experience to new staff members in the hopes of preventing any future mistakes. Throughout the discussions of their experiences, they referred to these experiences as “haunting,” and mentioned feelings of shame and guilt, which suggest the personal stress these traumatic events may provoke. In the oncology nurses de Carvalho et al.
(2005) studied, the nurses themselves making errors was another of the highest stressors they experienced, and it seems fair to conclude that mistakes or accidents are a source of possible trauma and subsequent stress for the aquarists.
The value of longer-term employees is shown in the response they have to errors: their strong avoidance of similar mistakes and desire to communicate it to others can enhance animal welfare, and result in a general decrease in major errors over time as they gain experience.
However, regardless of an aquarists’ experience level, sickness and death remain a regular feature of the work experience. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 103
“Don’t name the fish, it’s the kiss of death”: the regular pulse of fish loss.
An aquarist may be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of lives each day. Fish, frogs and invertebrates are often smaller than typical zoo animals, and frequently maintained in large groups or schools. Although some may be long-lived—25-80 years is not unheard of in some fish species—others, such as small tetras, have shorter life spans, and may live only a year or two, while the giant Pacific octopus, despite its reputed intelligence, generally doesn’t live beyond five. Consequently, unlike professionals who care for larger species such as dolphins or monkeys, a regular pulse of life and death typifies the aquarist’s world. Day after day, aquarists remove dead bodies from various tanks, and they constantly interact with complex, mechanical life support systems that have various ways of failing, to potentially tragic effect. Sickness and chronic health problems abound, and aquarists may not always know what is wrong or how to remedy it. As aquarists acquire new specimens to re-stock displays, through either collecting or arranging for shipments of new animals, opportunities for significant mortality events increase due to the delicate nature of transporting aquatic creatures. In what follows, we explore some of the many such situations the participants shared, illustrating the relentless nature of sickness and death inherent to the work, and how they appear to negotiate these potentially distressing experiences.
Nathalie spoke of mysterious health problems and cancers that seemed to plague fish in exhibits which had been recently renovated. She worried that cement and coating used in the new exhibits might not be good for the fish. In some new exhibits, she could not even scrub the walls, because the cement and coating would dissolve into the water, after which, she said, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 104
We started losing sandfish, like a couple a day, or, maybe a couple a week in the
beginning, and then it was just to the point where like, “You have a dead sandfish, you
have a dead sandfish,” like, all the radio calls.
As she said this in a flat tone, I got the sense that there was almost a shocking monotony to the regularity of the alerts she would get about these dead fish. Then she immediately jumped to telling me about a number of new cases of cancer found in some fish, who, after their exhibit had been renovated, started to have “no tissue on the fin in between their fin rays,” and generally looked to be in poor health. We both were startled at the absurdity of this—cancer in fish is generally not considered common—and sat there, faces scrunched in disbelief. “It’s just—never- ending!” she said. She said she felt emotional just telling me about these stories. “It just makes me frustrated,” she said. “It just makes me wish that it could be better.” As Nathalie’s recounting of the disease and mortality that affects the Aquarium’s fish collection illustrates, aquarists must cope with a significant volume of deaths on a regular basis, as part of the job.
Connor discussed the sheer volume of lives the aquarists deal with, and how it’s next to impossible to track all of them, especially with larger, multi-species displays:
I don’t know how many thousands of animals I’ve collected, and put in displays, you
know, and—and, tons of them probably didn’t live. Like we’d collect lots of nudibranchs,
toss them in there. And you see them and all of a sudden maybe you don’t see one in a
while...So you’re not sure whatever happened to it, maybe it did like live a normal
amount of time. But, a lot of times you’re—especially on the bigger space displays for
us. You chuck a bunch of inverts in there just to fill it up and you don’t really have any BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 105
idea how—[laughs ]—they end up doing. And in a couple of years you go, oh getting low
on those again. But you’re not really sure why so—I think you have to have a bit of a
tough skin for—for that kind of thing.
Connor’s use of the term “tough skin” to describe how he thinks an aquarist needs to cope with the volume of lives—and deaths—inherent to the aquarist work experience reflects that of
Menzies Lyth’s nurses (1960), who had to develop professional detachment and a “stiff upper lip” (p. 103) to defend against the anxiety caring for sick patients could provoke. In Connor’s case, having a “tough skin” could function as a defense mechanism against the possibility of emotional distress that becoming attached or emotionally involved with all these animals might lead to.
Connor went on to discuss what he thought were positive changes in how the Aquarium treated the fish, saying,
Back in the old days, where no one really cared if a fish didn’t look too good, you just
bonk it on the head and get another one. But that was just the mentality, it was not a big
deal. But then—and I think it’s good that now uh, you don’t do that. You know, and—
and you take responsibility more for, whether it’s a tetra or a, you know, killer whale,
you wanna have that same feeling of, responsibility towards it or you know, trying to do
the best you can sort of thing.
While Connor seemed pleased with what he felt were advances in the ethics of the fish care at the Aquarium, I found his use of the euphemistic term “bonk” to describe killing fish notable. He used the term frequently when discussing fish euthanasia, which suggests that some form of BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 106
detachment or distancing from the act of fish-killing, which might otherwise be psychically painful to someone who is devoted to caring for fish, may be at work. Bandura (1999) refers to this as “euphemistic labelling,” (p. 3) a process of sanitizing language in order to detract from the emotional intensity of the reality being referenced, stating that “sanitizing euphemisms are used extensively in unpleasant activities that people do from time to time” (p. 4). Euphemistic language is also prevalent in the health care field. Physicians have been found to protect themselves from the emotional content of their work by creating linguistic distance as a kind of defensive armor: for example, they may choose to use words that have the least emotional content, such as “cases” rather than “patients”, since it is easier to lose a case than a patient
(Mintz, 1992, p. 229).
In a manner similar to Connor, Lisa appeared to use distancing as a defense mechanism for reducing her emotional distress, seeming to suggest that it would be difficult for her to stay functional if she felt the real weight of the deaths she was exposed to:
L: I mean once we collect it, I’d like to say “oh yeah, I tracked it and followed it”, like if
you’re talking about a fish. But ultimately, you kind of have to disassociate, because it’s
too painful if it, like it—you have too many animals to maintain. Can’t remember one
particular greenling that you caught and follow where it moves from different tank to
different tank. I don’t really do that. I mean, obviously the big ones, like the octopus, you
know. But um, it’s too hard to—to think about it because then you’re bogged down by
the deaths whereas—it’s like when people start naming things. It’s—it’s like losing your BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 107
pet, why would you do that? Why would you ever do that, I don’t understand. It’s too
hard. It’s too hard to take that burden.
J: Yeah. The adage in [the Tropical Waters department] used to be don’t name the fish,
it’s the kiss of death.
L: It is. But it’s also—it’s too hard, too much to take on. If you follow each case and feel
it. Like if you, take the baggage from that fish and carry it on, it, it—makes it too hard.
Just makes it too hard. I wanna do right by the fish and treat them as well as I can. But I
don’t really wanna bond with them, because I can’t. Like, what if my coverage 34 kills it?
Then like, I’d be devastated. Like I can only do my part. But yeah. I definitely—I mean I
used to have ones like that where I’d like, hand feed and love them and then they all died.
And then, it was just like, my dog dying over and over again. I’m like, I can’t do this. It’s
too much. So I just do the best I can in the practice that I already do. But I’m kind of out
of it in terms of associating with particular animals because it’s just too hard.
Lisa repeated several times that it’s simply “too hard” to name or otherwise bond with the fish, because she would risk being “devastated” if the fish were to die. She shared that she’d been deeply emotionally distressed previously when she had become attached to some of the fish and they had died. When she said that it’s too hard to “associate with particular animals”, she seemed to be implying that she maintains a kind of emotional distance between herself and the animals by avoiding becoming attached and avoiding naming them.
34 Staff secondarily responsible when the primary aquarist is not on duty. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 108
Menzies Lyth (1960) observed that the reduction in individual distinctiveness—“denial of the significance of the individual” (p. 101)— in how nurses referred to patients not by name, but by bed numbers or diseases, reflected an implicit operational policy of detachment which served to minimize attachment, thus reducing the potential for the nurses to experience pain and distress. Menzies Lyth observed this as a part of the social defense system 35 she identified operating among the nurses. The Aquarium adage I shared, “don’t name the fish, it’s the kiss of death”, along with the habit of referring to fish using their Latin names—such as “the motoros,” 36 would seem to reflect a similar defensive technique that has become socially entrenched in the aquarist culture.
In the following passages, Connor’s reflections illuminate the complexities aquarists must negotiate, around attachment and the need to kill animals from time to time. Connor shared that he can “bonk” a salmon on the head without a problem, but that one time, his wife’s cat, who used to bring fish in occasionally, brought in a little bird, and he felt very differently:
I was so mad—the little bird, it was injured, and, I had a hard time, putting it out of its
misery—like, it’s so hard to do. But with a fish, it’s funny, for me, I still have that old
school kind of thing. It’s not like I want to, but I can do that. And, in the aquarium we’ve
actually had to cull some animals here and there. And, I do feel bad about it, but I can do
35 As detailed in chapter 2, social defense systems may be found where individuals “co-operate in shared aspects of the social system to support more rigid and primitive defence mechanisms in the individuals” (Hinshelwood & Skogstad, 2000, p. 4). 36 I have provided several examples of how aquarists primarily refer to the fish in their care using latin names. Sometimes it is only practical when referring to populations of hundreds of indistinguishable fish, such as a school of herring or cod, but in other cases they seem to substitute as alternatives to pet-like names, thus reducing attachment while serving to identify an individual if needed. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 109
it, it’s not that big a deal to me, but if it was a warm-blooded animal, I couldn’t do it, like,
a mouse? I couldn’t just bash a mouse on the head, you know?
Again, Connor uses a common euphemistic term—“cull”— to describe killing fish. Yet, he seems unable to transfer this “tough skin” to a non-piscine animal. He recounted, in a similar vein, that it isn’t a problem for him to eat seafood (Lisa also mentioned this) but that there were some fish at work he could individually recognize, and who he wouldn’t want to “do that to,” such as “old bluelips,” the tiger rockfish with distinctive colouration. The fact that “old bluelips” is an individually recognizable fish may inadvertently bypass the social defense mechanism represented by the adage that “naming the fish is the kiss of death”. It appears that a defensive detachment or desensitization may be at work as Connor describes his cavalier attitude about some (but not all) fish, yet recoils in mental pain at having to kill the injured bird the cat brought in.
The practice and social defense of not naming the animals may reduce the aquarists’ level of attachment, subsequently reducing grief and emotional distress when the animal dies. This would serve to protect the aquarists from one form of psychic pain. Psychic pain in the work of aquarists may come in many forms, but moral distress, when the aquarists experience it, seems to be a particularly difficult situation.
Moral distress and guilt in the aquarist work experience.
Moral distress contributes to burnout in nurses (Wagner, 2015) and is a top contributor to compassion fatigue in veterinarians (Kahler, 2015). The aquarists seemed to experience moral distress in different ways. As detailed above in “the cost of caring”, there was some distress BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 110
associated with not being able to complete their work to the standard they felt was right in terms of animal welfare. Aquarists also encounter a form of moral distress much like that encountered by veterinarians who face ethical quandaries about euthanizing their patients.
For example, Richard recounted some of the difficulties he has encountered when his opinion about when to euthanize an animal differed from that of the veterinary department:
I’ve gotten into fights with vet staff over this very topic. In fact, both from different sides.
Like sometimes there’s been animals where they refuse to euthanize even though we’re
manually feeding it every day. Its lost mobility and it has no quality of life. Where—and
it’s an animal you know, like even if it can tolerate small stints of being handled, it’s by
no means a stress-free scenario. You’re almost certainly like stressing it out every time
you interact with it. Like let’s end this and they, they won’t because it still is eating... It’s
not mutilated, so they’re just like “no, keep just feeding it and see if they’ll gain weight
again.” Um, and then at other times, there’s been ones where um, they’ve wanted to put it
down and I’ve said “no. This animal is still fine, let’s—let’s hold on to it a bit longer.”
And it’s, yeah there’s a bit of nuance in knowing where that line is for different animals.
Like we have a chameleon now with a broken hind limb. And we’re debating doing
surgery to remove the leg, because without that its locomotion will probably improve. It’s
still eating on its own, doesn’t even require assist feeding. So you know, I’m happy to
give it a shot and see how far it goes and the vet staff are like, “ah I think we should just
euthanize it ’cause its quality of life isn’t great.” And yeah, I feel hypocritical coming at
it from just recently with them, from the other side of this. Where they didn’t want to, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 111
and I did. For what from the outside may not look like a very different situation. But you
know, it’s different enough when you’re working with the animal that you can tell sort of
intuitively what is and isn’t suffering, I think.
These kinds of quandaries or dilemmas may put aquarists at risk of experiencing moral distress, and be a source of significant stress, or even trauma, for aquarists like Richard. He was impassioned enough to get in fights—which could increase interpersonal conflict and result in additional stress— defending his perspective on behalf of the animals’ welfare.
Animals’ deaths sometimes take place well before the animals are ever housed at the
Aquarium. Several aquarists shared stories about being involved in shipping and collecting specimens for display, and some of their complicated feelings around that. Both Richard and
Nathalie had experienced being on the receiving end of exotic animal shipments where many of the animals died. Nathalie recounted receiving more sandfish to stock up the display, since so many were dying, and “the water was literally yellow—and every fish was like, not dead, but like, autolyzed,”37 and she gagged as she opened the bags. Nathalie felt badly about this shipment: “Just feeling like crappy about it. Like ‘that’s nice, nice life we gave you.’ Like, ‘You suffocated in a bag full of ammonia.’”
Even though Nathalie herself was not responsible for the way the fish had been shipped, she seems to be implying that she was somehow responsible for what happened by saying “Nice life we gave you”. I had the sense that she might have felt guilty about having ordered them. I had experienced feelings of guilt when a shipment I received went particularly badly, with
37 Decomposing. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 112
hundreds of cardinal tetras dying immediately after they’d arrived at the Aquarium. It seemed profoundly wrong to me that our desire to display these fish had driven the demand for their collection and that after weeks of transit, they died in the bags and in our quarantine tanks. These kinds of situations may trigger feelings of guilt and/or moral distress in aquarists, in that having ordered the fish to arrive at the Aquarium sentenced the fish to these grisly deaths.
For the aquarists who had done any collecting themselves, there might be an even more direct link to feelings of guilt, because they are directly removing the animal from its natural habitat. I heard numerous stories of collecting mishaps, including deadly temperature fluctuations, and water for the animals being contaminated by diesel fuel from the marina. Even the action of collecting itself may hurt or kill a fish immediately, as Lisa shared:
Even when we’re angling and we bring [certain] fish up from depth and it happens to not
be the species of fish that we want, we put it back. But [in some species] once it comes
up from depth, its swim bladder is, you know, expanded.38 Its eyes may be popped out
and it, there’s no way it’s gonna survive. So it becomes literally eagle food. Like we
watched it, we had like five fish over a course of, I don’t know, three hours. And the
eagles just come and grab it right there. They’re floating, they can’t swim away, I mean,
how sad is that? But is it better than trawling? Sure. ’Cause it’s one fish. But—it’s one
fish, I’ve basically just murdered that fish. That’s a lot on your conscience.
38 The air in the fish’s swimbladder is compressed when they are at depth (20 or so metres) but expand when they are drawn up to the surface, so they are unable to swim back down. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 113
Lisa doesn’t sugarcoat it: she feels that she murdered the fish she pulled up from depth. To defend against the psychic pain this situation presents, Lisa appears to once again employ a defense mechanism of numbing or distancing herself from the situation, much as she described in avoiding becoming attached to the fish in her care:
I just try and desensitize myself. ’Cause it’s just too much, you could be too empathetic,
it’s just too much. It’s too much to take. You just try and do the best you can. Or you
hope to God that it’s not a widow rockfish 39 on your hook. Please. Please be a lingcod, so
it can just go back at depth.
Lisa goes on to share that she does feel “guilty” if she takes an animal from the wild, brings it back to the Aquarium, and it doesn’t do well: “Immensely guilty that you just took it and now all of a sudden it’s dying because you happened to choose that particular one. If only you didn’t choose that one.” The guilt Lisa shares about her selection of that individual fish to bring into captivity suggests another form of moral distress or psychic pain aquarists are at risk of experiencing. She shared that when she sees movies, like Finding Nemo ,
You think, “Oh my god. I took it from its home.” You know like, “I did. I did rip it, I
took this octopus that’s only gonna live for 4 years and put it into this tank.” And then
just when it’s about to reproduce, there’s no male or female, and then it’s gonna die a
horrible death. Instead of being eaten naturally by lingcod. [ laughs ]
39 Rockfish species often fare poorly when pulled up from depth, and end up floating, unable to swim back down, unlike other species such as the lingcod Lisa mentions. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 114
As Lisa discusses this feeling of guilt she seems to have around some of her collecting activities, she seems to make a joke, implying that for the octopus, a preferable death is by predation in the wild, yet also suggesting, by her laughter, that she knows that’s not necessarily an improvement, since life in the wild can also be tough. Despite the guilt she felt, she also seemed able to recognize the complexity of the activity in which she’s engaging, suggesting that she has unresolved or ambivalent feelings about her collecting practices, which she wasn’t quite willing to label as purely good or bad.
Ian also shared stories of his collecting experiences, noting that he had been collecting at
Flores Inlet for decades, but had recently noticed that the abundance of certain fish species had plummeted. He noted that other aquariums in the area had opened up, and they all knew about this good collecting spot:
So everybody knew about Flores Inlet so the last time we went we put out a net and we
caught one kelpfish and we used to catch hundreds. And it’s like oh … I thought wow you
know, I sure hope he wasn’t the last one in Flores Inlet and uh, so I felt bad about that,
you know?
Ian, who shared his expansive love for the natural world with me throughout the interviews, noted that he felt especially upset with environmental degradation, which seemed to be represented in the anecdote about Flores Inlet. He shared that in response to his growing discomfort with being complicit in the form of ecosystem degradation he felt his collecting activities contributed to, he chose to no longer participate, leaving it to the staff who were more BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 115
excited to do so. 40 It seemed that unlike Lisa’s ambivalent feelings about collecting, Ian’s choice to cease collecting suggests a response to guilt and moral distress that he was no longer willing to tolerate.
Connor described that animal care at the Aquarium had improved over the years and that the number of animals they collected had gone down substantially. He says it seems “worth it” now to do the collecting, implying that the overall cost to the animals is lower because of the education role the Aquarium plays.
You go “OK, that’s worth it,” ’cause I also—I often thought, it’s not fair for me to think
this way, but—you know we are out on the boat and you see a big dragger dragging the
bottom and he hauls his net up and you see this big wad of stuff. The guy’s you know,
he’s a shrimp—shrimp dragger. It’s all bycatch. You can’t actually go behind him
because there’s all these dead fish, all squashed pouring out the back. And then you get
about 5 pounds of shrimp out of it. So you think, my career at the aquarium probably had
less, way less biomass than that one net load. You know so—you know you put it in the
big picture, it’s pretty small potatoes.
In this passage, Connor seems to be making the case that collecting is relatively harmless, by rationalizing that the big trawlers do so much more damage than he ever has in his entire
Aquarium collecting career. He goes on to say:
40 I had anticipated that environmental stressors would be a stronger theme with participants. Surprisingly, Ian was the only one for whom it figured prominently. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 116
I think the BC coast like, if you look at the coastline, in general, the entire bottom’s been
dragged like, about three hundred per cent. So there’s been a net on average dragging
across the bottom 3 times. You know. And the whole coast.
He seems to be implying that it’s the trawlers who are really damaging the environment, not his collecting activities. Norgaard (2006), in her study of climate change in a Norwegian community, observed the use of “perspectival selectivity” (p. 390) as an emotional management strategy 41 , where community members emphasized Norway’s small population size and contrasted it with the much larger population in US, making the case that regardless of what they might do, they were not as bad as Americans in terms of contributing to climate change.
Similarly, Connor appears to be using the emotional management strategy of perspectival selectivity when he compares his collecting activities to big trawlers. This way of diminishing his own impact may “defend” Connor against any guilt he may have about his participation in collecting.
Ian also seemed to be making sense of his ambivalence about collecting and his having collected what he worried might be the last kelpfish in Flores Inlet by relating to the imagery of the bottom draggers. His decision to stop collecting stemmed from uncertainty about his credibility as a conservationist:
By pulling the last one out you know you’re not allowing the species to do what it’s
supposed to do, and so that doesn’t make me a very good conservationist. And I always
41 Norgaard’s (2006) “emotional management strategies” seem to map on well to what are referred to as “defensive techniques” in Menzies Lyth (1960) and defense mechanisms, coping strategies, or the broader category of defensiveness as explained by Cramer (2006) BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 117
used to think I was. But now I’m starting to think well, maybe I’m not the best
conservationist in the world. You know, and then going out and collecting. Okay you
know, I could say—well I mean if you look at all the collecting that's ever taken place in
the last sixty years that the aquarium has been open, right, I mean think of all the animals,
all the different things that have been collected in a collection, that doesn’t even compare
to, like, you know you could go up to the Queen Charlottes and they do one set of one of
these great big draggers dragging the bottom with their, you know, three ton doors and
that just destroys the bottom and collects thousands and thousands of fish and things like
that and invertebrates and just everything that’s there, it’s like plowing a field right? Um,
that would probably be more than we’ve ever had, I mean if you probably excluded the
killer whales and the beluga whales.
While Ian seems to be “trying on” the emotional management strategy that the bottom draggers do much worse damage, it ultimately doesn’t seem to work as a successful form of defensiveness for him, as illustrated by his decision to cease collecting. It appears that part of his motivation was the threat he recognized the collection of the last kelpfish posed to his identity as a “good conservationist”.
Acutely traumatic incidents and more chronic or lower-intensity types of trauma both appear to be present in the work experiences of the aquarists I interviewed. Navigating these traumas and staying functional appeared to result in different forms of defensiveness for each aquarist, and sometimes, social forms shared by the aquarists. Although defensive techniques may assist aquarists in staying engaged and functional to do their work, the chronic nature of BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 118
deaths has the potential to take a toll on aquarists. Some described being haunted by their experiences, experiencing anxious nightmares, as Nathalie did, yet most of them manage to stay resilient, by focusing on their passion for the work and the animals. However, the aquatic world the aquarists inhabit as they go about their work exists inside another world: that of the
Aquarium, the organization whose mission they support with their work.
Chronic Stressors and their Relationship to Burnout
We’ve seen how the aquarists often harbour complicated feelings about their work and regularly endure traumatic experiences that they must defend themselves from to stay functional.
Their unique work experience then intersects with the organization, which inhabits a peculiar junction, its goals sometimes appearing at odds with other parts of its mission. While the aquarists consider themselves deeply devoted to animals, Aquarium protestors claim the mantle of “real” animal devotion. The Aquarium claims to have “world class” animal care, yet it hosts loud, bright parties that the aquarists find cause stress to the animals and doesn’t provide the resources the aquarists feel would truly support “world class” animal care. The Aquarium claims, in public, to be proud and unapologetic for its display of cetaceans over many years (Tanner,
2017), yet simultaneously changes its name to “Ocean Wise,” as if to distance itself from being an aquarium, leaving the aquarists puzzled. In the following section, we explore how these organizational, social, and political factors—in short, the psychosocial dimensions— combine with the already taxing and often traumatic work the aquarists do to create an environment where aquarists experience work-related stress that may increase their risk of burnout.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 119
“World class, my ass”.
The aquarists were clear that they prioritized the well-being of the animals in their care, often engaging in personal sacrifice to do so. However, I got the sense that they sometimes felt alone in this. A sense of disconnection operating at many levels permeated the interviews, and seemed to leave the aquarists feeling disappointed, disillusioned, or “jaded,” as Lisa put it.
A disjunct between the organizational culture, or personae, and the experience of the aquarists became apparent through my interviews and my own personal experiences. For example, during the time I worked at the Aquarium, the phrase “world class” was introduced in marketing to the public and in all-staff meetings, to seemingly valorize the standard of care the aquarium claimed to be giving. I recalled hearing the phrase “world class, my ass” used by those in the marine mammal department, so I asked the aquarists whether they had heard this catchphrase, and if so, what came to mind when I said it. Ian immediately shared another twist on the theme: “what we say upstairs is ‘third-world class,’ because—oh, world-class institution, we go ‘oh yeah right, third-world class.’”
These sayings seem to serve to differentiate between what is advertised and what the reality is. Nathalie recalled that “world class, my ass” was a “common saying” and meant that
“basically the Aquarium is a joke, and we put all this marketing and messaging that we’re like, so professional. We’re doing these amazing things, like we’re saying in that video, and at first glance, for a visitor, or a first-time person, going there…” As she described the Aquarium as a joke, I sensed disaffection and cynicism that seemed to tie in to her earlier disappointment when she found out the wolf eel video was more marketing than reality. In our second interview, she BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 120
recalled how the glossy marketing messages and well-edited videos drew her to the organization initially, because she wanted to be part of something “so good.” She expresses a real sense of disappointment, saying that after being amazed by all of that, she later learned,
…that it’s like, not true. And in some cases, like, not even close. So yeah, it’s kind of, I
feel like, I talked about it a little bit last time, too— that whole, when you first start,
you’re like pretty keen, and pretty motivated, and then you slowly start to like see all the
things where it’s like, “oh, there’s no money to do that, oh, we can’t do that, oh, that’s
always been that way,” like, “that pipe has been like hanging on by a thread” or, like “oh
yeah, ha, we’ll ‘bojang 42 ’ this” and that’s like, the standard. And oh yeah, of course, we
do things a certain way, that’s clearly subpar, but everyone’s accepted that that’s—fine—
[pause ]—and then, just that, kind of, chipping away at like your first impression and
perspective that drew you in.
The way Nathalie described a “chipping away” at her initial perspective suggests a sense of disillusionment contiguous with her experience of finding out the wolf eels in the marketing video were going to end up culled at an aquaculture lab. This seemed to extend to her personal relationships as well, when she describes that visitors would not really be able to tell that the aquarium that’s marketed to them isn’t the same as the one the aquarists are working in. She says they would only know,
42 Urbandictionary.com defines “bojang” as “to quickly repair or fix anything that is broken, to either temporarily or permanently get working back to its original state. To improvise on demand.”
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 121
…if they knew someone, like if I have friends that are like “oh my god, the aquarium is
amazing,” and I’m like, “Is it…?” [ voice lowers , laughs ] And like, just totally like, broke
their hearts right in front of them, and like, told them all the horrible things—[laughs]—
like—[laughs]—then they would know!
As Nathalie recounted puncturing her friends’ idealized visions about the Aquarium, yet desiring to hide this “truth” from visitors, I felt that I shared in her sense of disillusionment, having experienced similar situations myself. It seemed necessary to conceal from visitors or other members of the public the disappointing or difficult aspects of the work. I had personally experienced this an uncomfortable state of psychological disequilibrium, which led me to consider that Nathalie might, too. This discomfort might be defended against by the use of the joke “world class, my ass”.
Like Nathalie, Connor also used the word “joke” in response to my prompt inquiring about this phrase. He expressed disappointment at how he felt other aquariums he had visited were doing a better job on some things than the Vancouver Aquarium. He, too, knew the phrase, and said:
You realize what you really need to—to get there. And you just, you’re nowhere near
that. So it becomes a joke you know, that as a joke, yeah. That’s kind of sad when you
know, that term is a you know, is a joke in the building.
The way Connor describes “world class, my ass” as a joke in the building—not just isolated to him— suggests that humour may be a form of social defense mechanism the aquarists use. Humour can be used as a defense mechanism to address “embarrassing, uncomfortable or BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 122
stressful situations” (Trevithick, 2011, p. 399) Laughing together at the disjunct between the standards marketed to the public by the Aquarium—that they feel compelled to uphold to visitors or friends — and the everyday realities the aquarists see may function to protect them from the psychic pain that may result from this conflict. While a joke may seem like an insignificant form of defensiveness, the cynicism it breeds may contribute to burnout (Angerer, 2003).
Hypocrisy leads to a loss of trust and pride.
The aquarists all badly wanted their work, and the Aquarium, to be what it seemed to promise. However, as their experiences and the hypocrisies they observed threatened the vision of what the work could be, they seemed to lose trust in the organization. Lisa was clear: “I don’t trust this organization anymore. I don’t believe what they say, because I’ve seen it too many times. Too many times.” She described an exposé in which a coffee chain had “new bins that had organics and plastics and everything’s separated” but had just been dumping it all back together into the garbage. She said it reminded her of the Aquarium:
Like how much are they actually sending to waste? Like a dumpster full of fleeces. And
yet they claim to be green? Like don’t—They’re just, it’s all propaganda and for show.
Like they’re just promoting themselves as gold leaf and you know, best, uh they just—
just uh— see I’m getting like stressed out thinking about it because they’re so—there’s
so much hypocrisy, that—and the people are like, oh you must be really proud to work at
the Aquarium. And I’m like, no, not really. Because that’s, I know, I’m not proud to
work for them. I’m proud of the work I do, but I’m not proud to work for the Aquarium.
Are you kidding me? Look at what they’re doing. [ laughs ] Like you’re telling me that BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 123
they actually go do like these great things that they say they do, like the shoreline clean
up and even—uh, I don’t know.
It struck me as quite painful and disappointing that Lisa shared that she was proud of her work, but not of working for the Aquarium. Along similar lines to how Nathalie discussed puncturing her friends visions of the Aquarium, Lisa brought up the inability agree with those who assume she would be proud to work for them. It seemed to encapsulate much of the frustration I had heard from other participants as well. Lisa seemed to make the case that a lot of the “hypocrisy” could be easily remedied, and the fact that the Aquarium did not do it seemed to lead her to conclude that it was more nefarious, seemingly contributing to her loss of trust.
The way Lisa described the Aquarium’s environmental advocacy as “propaganda” implies she feels they, along with the coffee chain she mentioned, were guilty of
“greenwashing 43 ”. She went on to describe a number of other scenarios that she found frustrating and considered hypocritical, such as the pollution from the big Aquavan truck that brings sea creatures to classrooms and the use by grounds-keepers of gas-powered leaf blowers instead of rakes. She summed it up, saying:
Because what they say and they preach that we do, we don’t. And they don’t spend the
money to have better filtration systems, so you don’t get all that. They don’t fix what
issues they have with the piping or how it’s returned or get some UV filters or you know,
they’re not doing any of that stuff and yet here they talk about great gold standard.
43 Greenwashingindex.com defines greenwashing as “when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be “green” through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact.” BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 124
As Lisa continued describing the deficiencies that had eroded her trust in the organization and her sense of being proud of the organization she worked for, she said:
I mean, we’re not giving it all we can, we’re not doing what we—you know. And yet,
we’re supposed to be world class. It’s like you’re kidding me, right? Like, how could you
say that? We have like rusty you know, hose clamps, or whatever. Dripping into exhibits.
Oh, they’re you know, we don’t have time or there’s no staff to change them out or it’s
not in the budget. And it’s like, what? Like where’s that on the news? [ laughs ]
The way Lisa indicts the Aquarium as “not giving it all we can” suggests another disjunct.
Throughout the interviews, she and the other participants had shared their willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the animals, giving animal care everything they could. Yet, the organization she did this work under didn’t seem to reflect her sense of ethics and desire to provide a “world class” standard of animal care and environmental advocacy.
Like Lisa, Richard also shared a sense of waning trust in the organization when I described my experience of not wanting to tell people where I worked as much as I had earlier in my career:
J: I feel like, when I started, I was like really proud to tell people I worked at the
Aquarium... and that, over time, I—you know, at parties or whatever—
R: Mm-hm.
J: I was a little more cagey about it.
R: Yup! No, I actually share the same sentiments there, too.
J: Yeah? BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 125
R: I think just, the longer I’ve been in the culture, it seems less sincere than you’d like.
Um, I mean—
J: What seems less sincere?
R: [ pause ] All of it. All the greenwashing, as it were, it just feels, more and more like
words, and less like it actually means something, to the upper management. [ pause ] And,
I mean, it’s not like, most industries, or businesses don’t have a high regard for the top
couple [of] people, but, I feel like, more and more, that trust is waning at the Aquarium. I
mean, it feels like there are a number of—missteps. Whether it’s the way that staff get
treated, or whether it’s, um, you know, a dumpster full—[laughs ]—of old fleeces—
[laughs ]
J: Right!
R: It’s—it’s all those little things, add up, over 12 years, and there’s just—there’s not a
lot of good faith left there, I think. Sadly. So, yeah, I’m, yeah, I’m a little more hesitant
about it. I feel that—I mean, I don’t know how to say it any more gently than this, but I
increasingly find myself, not going to any meetings of the type—like, all-staff meetings,
or whatever. It feels a little too cult-like to me.
It seemed that Richard’s perception of the Aquarium’s attempts at what he saw as
“greenwashing” affected his overall trust in the organization, as reflected in his sense that he didn’t have a lot of “good faith” in the organization left. He linked his loss of trust in the organization with his hesitancy to attend the all-staff meetings the organization regularly held.
Lisa, too, expressed a desire to never attend an all-staff meeting again if she could avoid it. All- BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 126
staff meetings seemed to be a particularly painful point for some of the other aquarists too, as I shared with the participants my own sense that they had felt like propaganda when I’d been attending them. Richard expanded on how he found the meetings “cult-like”:
R: It’s all just like chants about like, how awesome we are, and how wrong everyone else
is, and you—there’s more nuance [laughs] to life than that! And, it just, it feels a little
too much like, toe the line, or else, kinda stuff. And I—I do get worried, every now and
then. And it doesn’t—it, yeah, it makes me uncomfortable, because I know we’re right-
ish , but I want it to be for the right reasons.
J: Mm-hm.
R: And not just because we’ve bought in to what they’re selling us. [ pause ]
J: Yeah, I’m really interested in hearing more about that, ’cause that’s something I
certainly shared, and, I think—I mean, was really widespread, you know, just a sense,
you would go to the meetings, and [ sighs ], I always had, felt like I had a little bit of a
wall up, like “ok, I’m hearing propaganda.”
R: Exactly, yeah.
J: Yeah.
R: That’s exactly how it feels. And it’s really uncomfortable. Uh, so, I mean, it’s—again,
it’s the words, when they come out, mostly sound fine, but, it’s—there needs to more
than just that. And, there needs to be less, us versus them. And more just, this is why we
think we’re doing the right things and we’re going to keep on at it. And, just—I think the
Aquarium’s been too bogged down in just, yeah, running a PR campaign. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 127
Richard said he wants to be right for “the right reasons”, and not because everyone has acquiesced to what he implied was senior management’s insistence on everyone toeing the line.
This suggests he might feel concerned about losing his sense of what he knows to be right by outsourcing his ethical standards to the Aquarium’s management, who he’d lost faith in. This ambivalence could prevent him from full engagement with the organization’s mandates and messaging, and increase his risk of burnout due to feelings of isolation, and a breakdown in his connection to the organizational community (Angerer, 2003).
Richard and I discussed examples of some of the more egregious missteps made by the senior management in the all-staff meetings. Throughout the interviews, the other aquarists had their own such senior management missteps to recall. However, in the interest of brevity I won’t share the details, except to say it seemed to be a regular occurrence for senior management to say or do something in all-staff meetings that the aquarists perceived as completely tone deaf or belittling and insulting.
Richard very succinctly expressed a theme I heard from most of the participants, relating to the tension they felt around a disconnect from the overall aquarium organization:
R: And again, that’s the stuff the public doesn’t hear, that that happened, but, every
meeting I’m at, and something like that happens, it definitely erodes your faith, a little
bit.
J: So when you talk about eroding your faith, can you help me understand a little more,
what you’re getting at there? BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 128
R: Yeah again, it’s just, sort of, the loss of trust that the Aquarium upper management is
really in this for the reasons all the staff are.
J: Mm.
R: And ultimately, they’re kind of not—they’re in it to maintain, a successful business,
even if we are a non-profit, um—
J: Mm.
R: But I think, you know, on the ground, especially in the animal care world, we’re all
here because we’re passionate about animals, or some of us are—um, at a minimum, we
don’t want our animals to suffer—we want to showcase them well to guests, and to keep
them happy, and safe, and healthy. We want to work together to broaden our horizons or
whatever, but then, from up top, there’s no indication that that’s actually an institutional
priority.
What it seems Richard was conveying are the reasons that the animal care staff at the Aquarium do what they do were not reflected by the priorities the upper management communicated to the staff. The cynicism and frustration he and the aquarists expressed may represent a manifestation of burnout, as suggested by Angerer (2003). Despite these misgivings, Richard reiterated his enjoyment of the work itself, seemingly to “repair” his expressions of cynicism and frustration while also distancing himself from what was happening in the organization around him:
For the people for whom this matters, that’s enough. The day to day work, you’re
minding your own section, and, again, talking about, earlier, about making little steps
towards progress. All of that is enough, that, when you—you forget about what’s going BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 129
on up top, essentially. And, it’s fine, until, every now and then, something happens that
reminds you, like, oh yeah, right, this is sort of what’s going on around me, and it, you
know—[laughs, gets quieter ]—it doesn’t inspire you—[laughs ]—with confidence.
The way Richard and some of the others felt disconnected from the organization and also distanced themselves from it may represent a defense mechanism. By not identifying so strongly with the organization and focusing more on their enjoyment of the work and their personal goal of excellent care for the animals, they are able to defend themselves against the psychic pain elicited by their frustration and disappointment in their experiences at the all-staff meetings, their perceptions of greenwashing, and their loss of trust in the organization and its management.
Norgaard (2006) observed that community members in her study were aware of the threat of global warming, but didn’t stress about it all the time, spending their days thinking about more local, manageable topics instead, seeming to choose a strategy of emotional management of
“focusing on something you can do” (p. 385). One of Norgaard’s participants described how
“’You have the knowledge, but you live in a completely different world’” (p. 386), which parallels Richard’s strategy of “making little steps towards progress” and forgetting “about what’s going on up top”. This strategy may help diminish psychological disequilibrium stemming from feelings of conflict or hypocrisy if Richard were to fully focus on the fact that he is doing what he considers environmentally conscientious work for an organization he accuses of greenwashing. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 130
“It’s almost like the aquarists don’t exist anymore”: Aquarists’ perception that the
organization is forgetting its roots.
A sense of loss permeated the discussions around the Vancouver Aquarium’s re-branding to “the Vancouver Aquarium, an Ocean Wise Initiative.” Ocean Wise is a global non-profit— with a strong digital presence— for “healthy and flourishing” oceans, which senior management conceived over a number of years and finally implemented in 2017. This move away from the
Aquarium as a local institution seemed to reify, for the aquarists, a sense that the aquarium was trying to run more of a business and less of an aquarium. The timing of the transition was such that the aquarists also perceived it as a reaction to the activists and protestors who were shaming the Aquarium for its practices. The aquarists all shared various versions of frustration around the idea that most people at the Aquarium seemed to be forgetting that the place was, in fact, an
Aquarium. They shared that meetings for exhibit design were heavily influenced by the food and beverage departments, and that the needs of the banquet manager seemed to be prioritized over the well-being of the animals and the aquarists.
The participants painted a picture of exhibits and working spaces that were often designed for the convenience of almost all other users, but not the aquarists or animals. Ian encapsulated these sentiments when he said that “there’s nobody advocating for the animals or the aquarists… it seems like it’s been getting harder and harder and harder to actually do a decent job.” They further illustrated that exhibits have long had ergonomically-problematic design components despite aquarists’ requests otherwise, sometimes causing injuries to both aquarists and animals. Aquarists’ requests for adequate resources and additional controls over the BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 131
life support systems and environment for the animals were frequently ignored, ultimately impacting the aquarists’ ability to do the “gold standard of care” work they felt they should be striving for if senior management did “walk the talk,” and perpetuated the risk of aquarists’ experiencing moral distress due to perceived resource insufficiency (Mänttäri ‐van der Kuip,
2016).
Aquarists also shared painful stories of being ignored by the President in professional situations. Further, Lisa and Connor shared that the President had said, in an all-staff meeting, that he didn’t want people to still be there after two years, describing jobs at the Aquarium as
“stepping stones”. This, along with the incidents of being ignored, resulted in them feeling unimportant, and that their profession was being seriously “devalued”, as Lisa put it:
What about the people who, you know, this is their careers. This is, they run your place
for you, you know? The engineering staff, the animal care staff. And you’re basically
saying, no, you know, just—it’s a nothing job, move on to the next job.
For Lisa, who fell in love with working at the Aquarium early on and demonstrated devotion to her daily work, this was clearly upsetting to hear in an all-staff meeting. Along these lines, Richard and Ian shared that they felt like senior management viewed aquarists as disposable or unambitious because of their desire to stay in the animal care field.
Ian went further, saying he felt like the aquarists almost didn’t exist anymore, and that their hard work goes unrecognized and unappreciated:
When you do it, you do it with a passion and you put your whole life and passion into
something, you need to get something back from it other than just, you know, the BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 132
knowledge that you’re doing you know that—the knowledge that you have that you're
doing a good job. I mean it would be nice for somebody up above you to, you know, pat
you on the back and say “hey, you’re doing a good job, you know, here’s a little bonus,
here's a little something extra, here’s a little treat, here’s a little something,” you know?
And it’s so weird it’s like—it’s almost like the aquarists don’t exist anymore, because of
the way they’ve designed the building over there. Because when I first—when it was first
built it was built for aquarists. Because they had—all your tanks were lined up like this,
you had a nice big area to work behind, you had reserve tanks behind, you had a place,
you had a driveway you could go right—you could drive the truck right into the aquarium
you know, and there was the reserve tank right there, there was the food room right there
with a walk-in freezer right beside it.
It seems that Ian is describing a non-supportive work environment, both in how he desires but doesn’t get recognition for his efforts, and how he seems to feel invisible, as reflected in how the work environment is so poorly designed with regards to the aquarists’ needs.
Ian went on to describe with impressive detail the unnecessarily complex routine the new, non-aquarist-centric working space designs led to, describing having to walk around the entire building multiple times a day to access areas, pushing trolleys of frozen food in the rain and sleet all winter, dangerous food preparation practices, wearing masks for carcinogens newly discovered in enclosed working spaces, hauling giant tubs of water and more. Along with very high workload (also detailed in “the cost of caring”), a non-supportive work environment and BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 133
difficulties in doing a job effectively—much as Ian described— are known to be associated with burnout (Stamm, 2010).
All the aquarists shared examples of injuries, near-misses and patently unsafe working conditions they had to engage in to go about their daily work, work which is inherently slippery, involves ladders and carrying things, and the potentially dangerous mixture of water and electricity within cramped access. While some of the dangers are inherent to the nature of the aquarist work and they readily accepted that, the decisions that most irked the aquarists were where designs had been made more dangerous or inconvenient for budgetary reasons. Yet, as Ian and some of the others pointed out, they would “just deal with it” because they were dedicated to doing good animal care; but they knew if things were easier and more efficient, they could be doing better animal care. After expressing frustration about the lengthy hours of light
(photoperiod ) the fish endured for the late-night events, Ian came to the conclusion that event guests came to the Aquarium to see the fish, so the fish should have priority, but it appeared to him that “sometimes, I think they’re not—but we’re being told that they are.” Along these lines, he discussed his frustrations with his inability to practice his profession to the standard he wanted to:
You know, getting frustrated with—with what you have to work with and what you have
to deal with and—and seeing what goes on, it's like, I mean really, are the animals the top
priority? Because you’re sure making it difficult for me to do my job—to do a good job
and if it was a priority wouldn't you want me to do a really good job? Wouldn't you be
encouraging me? When I’m encouraged and I’m happy doing things I can do an amazing BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 134
job. I—I—I keep thinking—and I thought for years I could do a way better job than I’m
doing. If I had a bit of encouragement, if I had more resources, but it’s like “no you
know, here you go make do, make it work.” And uh, and I make it work because—
because I love the animals and—and I'm fascinated by what I’m doing. Intellectually it’s
great.
Despite the disappointment, Ian manages to once again re-iterate his love of the work itself, showing how his passion seems quite important to his resilience in the sometimes-disheartening
Aquarium organization work environment. Yet, the ongoing frustrations that inhibit the Ian and the other aquarist’s ability to care for the animals at a high standard may contribute to moral distress. The systemic design flaws he and some of the others described increase the workload and reduce the aquarists’ efficacy, both of which may contribute to burnout, which Stamm
(2010) defines as a “feeling of inefficacy,” which may be a result of “personal or organizational factors” and is associated with high workloads and poor system function (p. 22). Valent (2002) says burnout “results when one cannot achieve his or her goals and results in ‘frustration, a sense of loss of control, increased willful efforts, and diminishing morale’” (p. 27). The diminishing morale experienced by the majority of the aquarists I interviewed, as well as my own, seemed concurrent with frustration and a sense of loss of influence over their own working environment and the aquatic environments of their charges, and may be additional fuel for the risk of burnout in aquarists. de Carvalho et al. (2005) lists “feeling like I can’t get all my work done,” “when equipment and supplies are just not available,” and “not being able to get caught up” as significant stressors for the nurses they studied (p. 91), and Ian and the others relayed a sense of BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 135
agitation and disappointment when recalling examples of encountering limited resources, such as being denied the purchase of “a 23-dollar piece of vinyl tubing,” among other more significant equipment needed for high quality animal care.
As hard as aquarists work to take care of the animals despite obstacles, there are those who would not consider aquarium staff animal advocates, and who would insist on kindness to animals as the end of cetacean captivity, or in some cases, the end of the Aquarium altogether. In the following section, I will explore how the controversy about zoos and aquariums affects the participants.
“Empty the tanks”: the Aquarium’s protestors and detractors.
In my own early days, as I told Richard, I was excited to speak about my work in social situations as I felt like I had really made it and was thrilled to be at the Aquarium. As public conversations about the ethics of keeping whales at the Aquarium intensified, and as I became increasingly disillusioned with the Aquarium as part of my own career trajectory, I looked forward to being outside of work as a break. I made efforts to conceal my uniform if I didn’t have a change of clothes, and avoided the topic of what I did for work at parties. I reflected on this to the participants, and they shared some of the ways their own experience of work-related interactions with the public, or in some cases, protestors, left them feeling. Sometimes, the aquarists took great pains to avoid such interactions, expressing a sense of ambivalence around their own opinions and position, which seems to be, as Richard put it, more “nuanced” than the polarized views he was seeing between aquarium management and activist groups. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 136
Lisa told me she avoided wearing her uniform or discussing her work at the Aquarium with members of the public. She also avoided discussing it with family, since one of them was opposed to the Aquarium. I shared my own reluctance to tell people where I worked, and she responded that she did something similar:
L: I was, from the get-go, I was like, “yeah, the Aquarium!” Because I was conflicted
myself on the idea of an aquarium. Although I love aquariums. But if I really think about
the issue, it’s hard, what we do. So I’m conflicted, so I’m a little sensitive to that. And I
don’t wanna debate people on it ’cause I could see their point of view. “Yeah, you’re
right, absolutely.”
J: And what happens if you really see that point of view?
L: And that’s what I say. I say that to people who—and I’ve had arguments with family
members—and I’m just like, “you’re right, I agree with you. But we are displaying it, so
I do my absolute best to make it gets the best care possible.” And I believe that. And
that’s what I preach to new wex 44 students and employees. Like treat it really well.
Because we’ve done this to it.
J: Yeah. That’s, uh, it’s not always fun getting into those conversations and—
L: I avoid them at all costs.
J: Yeah like not, you probably wouldn’t wear your uniform like outside of work or—
L: Ever. I actually sit and I see people at the bus stop with their jackets on. And I’m like,
there’s not a chance I would ever indicate to anyone where I work.
44 “Work experience students”—high-school seniors who join for a program sponsored by the Aquarium. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 137
J: Wow.
L: I mean, I do on Facebook but those are my friends. But I would never do it in public.
I’m just not ready to confront someone, or have someone confront me and I’d be like,
you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Because that doesn’t look good. The Aquarium
should be like, no, no, we’re blah, blah, blah. And I’m just like, no I can see your, I can
see your point of view. However, we do our best to blah, blah, blah. But anyone can
argue that and go, “really? Well if you really were thinking that way, you’d just leave it
alone.” You’re right, we should. Because, yeah, you’re right, because it died the next day.
So yeah, how do you think I feel [ laughs ]. You know, like? It’s tough. It’s, it’s tough.
J: Yeah.
L: I mean I still, I value what I do and in the end it’s great. But uh. I don’t want to think
about it too much ’cause it’s very sad.
Lisa appears to have strong avoidance strategies: she avoids interactions where she might be forced to defend her employer or occupation, and avoids potentially painful thoughts, saying “I don’t want to think about it too much,” regarding her complicity in something she worries she might not ethically agree with, were she compelled to examine it further. Her avoidance strategies calls to mind that of the community members studied by Norgaard (2006). They used an emotional management strategy of “selective attention” to control exposure to painful information about problems for which they didn’t have solutions, and that otherwise aroused unpleasant emotions— saying “’I just don’t think about that”’ (Norgaard, 2006, p. 385). Along with the feelings of ambivalence she shared about her work, a component of moral distress BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 138
seems to be present. Lisa appears to attempt to “repair” this disjunct by vowing to take the best care of the animals she possibly can, feeling that’s her duty given the potentially ethically questionable nature of her work.
Nathalie, too, expressed ambivalence about the mission of the Aquarium, and separated her fish-keeping role from the marine mammal caretaking roles that were under much more public scrutiny. She said “no one is protesting, ‘Free the Lionfish,’” but said that she herself overall doesn’t know how she feels.
I guess they’ve made up their mind and they think it’s all wrong. Do they know all their
facts? Probably not. Are they totally wrong? Probably not. [ laughs quietly ] I always think
there’s something in the middle—and I haven’t quite sorted it.
Nathalie seems to be leaving room for her opinion to evolve, demonstrating how ambivalence
“presents the capacity to simultaneously hold competing, conflicting views, attitudes and affects about a place, practice, experience, or relationship,” (Lertzman, 2015, p. 109) much as she appeared to when she described the Aquarium a “love-hate relationship”.
Richard, however, did not seem to hold obvious conflicted feelings in how he viewed the protestor’s criticisms of the Aquarium from an ethical perspective. He mentioned several times that he felt captivity was actually a good place for the animals to be, and that he felt the protest movement was misguided:
R: Yeah, so like, that’s great . And it’s great that people are concerned about the quality
of life of animals in captivity. We all should be. There was a time when people weren’t.
[laughs ] I—the problem is, though, it’s a bit miscalibrated, and, again, we can recognize BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 139
as people who work with animals, that it is possible to meet all of an animal’s needs, and
still have it be in captivity. And, there’s no harm being done to anyone here. They can
still live good, rich lives, reproduce, behave—like, display all their natural behaviours,
and that’s fine. And we’re happy with that, because we think we’re meeting their needs,
there’s no suffering, Uh, you know, they’re getting probably a better life than they’d have
under any [other] circumstance. But, for people that don’t recognize that this is possible
to accomplish, that just, animals are only happy when they’re being chased by tigers
[laughs ]
J: [ laughs ] Yeah.
R: —uh, that—it, you know, it’s tough. And it’s not clear that they’ll stop at whales,
whales are just an easy target because they’re large. But almost certainly, the movement
will then go to, say, [sea] lions and seals, and then to any form of primate, and then any
form of avian, and then any form of reptile—like, they’ll keep finding some reason that a
skink shouldn’t be in an aquarium.
J: Mm-hm.
R: And it’s—yeah, whether they’re ultimately successful, who can say. But, it’s pretty
clear that it’s almost—for some people, that’s going to be their end game, is yeah, no
animal in captivity.
Richard seemed to “defend” against the protestors’ idea that he might be on the wrong side of animal advocacy by making the case that the animals were better off, but the discussion also seemed to provoke some anxiety around whether his own work might be endangered if the BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 140
protestors continued pressing forward with what he felt could very well become a “no animal in captivity” movement. He went on to explain how he felt that zoos and aquariums had a “really important role,” and expanded on the conservation benefits he envisioned from the act of caring for animals, and the ability for zoos and aquariums to positively contribute to people’s connection to animals and interest in making small behaviour changes:
It’s pretty engaging for people, and that can be enough to get them to change their
behavior so that things do get better in the wild, and all around the world. You know,
little by little, I sort of feel that that’s probably the best I can do. But that’s probably
fine—is, if just a couple people leave the gallery each year, thinking “wow, okay, I’m
going to do X, or whatever, like, phosphate-free laundry detergent or whatever, like, little
things,” and that’s fine, ’cause that’s what adds up in the end.
Focusing on the possible impacts of an Aquarium visit on people’s pro-environmental behaviour
(even in light of inadequate evidence that this is the case) may be a defensive technique on
Richard’s part, functioning to protect him from the possibility of ambivalence or moral distress with regards to his work. When Richard says “I sort of feel that’s probably the best I can do,” it echoes one of the emotional management strategies—“focusing on something you can do” (p.
387) used by the community members in Norgaard (2006).
Like Richard, Connor didn’t initially share any obvious ambivalence about his work, saying that when he had been collecting all those years, if he wasn’t okay with it, he “shouldn’t have been doing the job.” This firm resolve around participation in his work may serve to prevent him from experiencing ambivalence, which he might otherwise have found painful. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 141
When discussing the protestors, he said that they were all “professional protestors,” as if to discredit them, and he also seemed to suggest that the polarization seemed unnecessary to him:
Well ’cause they don’t, they might not see that we’re all the same, we’re on the same
side. Yeah, and I think that’s where they’re getting misinformation about “save the
whales,” you know. Someone’s convinced them that the Aquarium’s doing this or that,
you know. Did I tell you the other story? My sister was anti-aquarium, anti-whales in
captivity, this was years ago. Thirty years ago. And she had two little kids. And I said
“well I’d respect your opinion a lot more if you come in with an open mind, you actually
come into the building, see what we do, see what it’s all about. With an open mind and
then if you go—if at the end of the day you still feel that way, and I respect your opinion
hundred percent. But I don’t respect it if you just saw some news article or someone tells
you that you know, like this.” She came into the Aquarium with her two kids. And I
phone her up that night, go, how did your visit go? She said, ah, well, I got a family
membership. [ laughs ]
J: Oh, okay. That’s interesting.
C: So—so that’s where, she did, she took me by face value and she actually saw how
much her kids were getting out of it. Yeah. And she saw how much it meant to her kids,
let alone what they could get out of it growing up and—and seeing all this stuff that they
can’t get anywhere else, so. Yeah, that’s another one of my favourite stories that makes it
all worthwhile. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 142
Connor referred to this as his “favourite story”, as if he’d told it a lot. This suggests that he’d found himself in the position of defending the Aquarium with some regularity, and that this was a story he relied on to that end. To counter this rosy story, I mentioned to Connor that my own brother and sister-in-law had visited the Aquarium for the first time recently, and that they had seemed nonplussed, and felt sorry for the penguins. This spurred him to share that he had encountered a visitor who felt sorry for the arctic cod.
C: I also got a guy saying, with our Arctic cod in the cylinder just, how long, how long
are those fish in there for? “Uh, [they] spend their whole life in there.” And he just said,
“oh that’s terrible, and that’s too bad.” And I went, yeah I guess “you know, that could
look pretty crappy and maybe, maybe it isn’t very good.” But uh, you know. I sort of, I
think I just told him that “you know, I’ve been up in the Arctic and if you go along the
road even, there’s these little ditches on the side of the road. You can see Arctic cod in
there. These crappy little ditches and you know, they might make it out or they might
freeze to death. But there’s these ponds that are very small, they, they [are] just barely
existing you know. So I said, you know, not justifying this, maybe it isn’t good. But, life
out there in the wild isn’t all that great either a lot of the times.”
J: Right. Yeah, maybe it’s romanticized even.
C: Yeah, they’re up there swimming around and you know, whether it’s the octopuses is
another big one. People are always saying that the display is way too small.
J: Right. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 143
C: It’s just like you know, well go look at the you know [Pacific Canada] gallery and see
how often you see octopus there. There now it’s in its little den, it’s in there all the time
’cause that’s what they do, you know? For an octopus to go out and leave its den, it’s
like, hugely risky. You know, soft body, big animal, there’s tons of prey, you know.
Small ones. Anything will eat an octopus if it can probably if it’s small enough—you
know, seals and sea lions, I mean there’s tons of seals and sea lions. And so I said you
know, normally when you see an octopus quite often in the wild, it’s missing chunks of
it, you know arm or whatever. ’Cause they’re actually happy—but you know, I can’t
convince somebody of that.
Connor seems to be defending against the idea that the arctic cod or octopus are unhappy in their exhibits by rationalizing that the captive environments adequately match the wild environment, and that, much like Lisa said, “life out there in the wild isn’t all that great either a lot of the times”. Rationalization is a defense mechanism in which an explanation—that we may, on some level, understand is not true, but is nevertheless more appealing to us— is created in response to anxiety-provoking experiences or knowledge (Adams, 2015). Rationalization has also been connected to moral standards: Tsang (2002) defines moral rationalization as “the cognitive process that individuals use to convince themselves that their behaviour does not violate their moral standards” (p. 27). In this situation, either defensive technique may defend against anxiety but also the possibility of experiencing moral distress. Connor left some room for his own uncertainty when he shared that he “… said, you know, not justifying this, maybe it isn’t good.”
I sensed this uncertainty might indicate some anxiety, or that perhaps he wasn’t completely BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 144
convinced of the virtues of his work as he had advertised earlier. The possibly conflicted feelings
Connor may hold further support the notion that a defense mechanism, such as rationalization, may be at work.
Among all the participants, Ian had the most intense negative feelings about the
Aquarium’s protestors and detractors. He recalled that there had been speculation that protestors had poisoned the beluga whales, since both had died within three weeks of each other from an
“unknown toxin”. He shared an incident where he ran into an acquaintance in an elevator downtown, and was shocked at the fellow’s opinion:
I: It just made me sick to think about these stupid protesters you know oh let her out of
the pool. And then somebody said oh yeah they’re mad enough or they’re stupid enough
or they’re just crazy enough that they would actually rather see the animal dead than in
the pool. And I thought whoa really? Who thinks like that? And then I had this
conversation with the guy in the elevator, he says oh yeah it’s natural it increases the—
we should just let them die. Well if he believes that we should just let them die maybe
somebody else feels well we should kill them and that’s better they’re dead than living in
this little lonely pool.
J: So, they’re free of their suffering.
I: So, they’re free of their suffering it’s like whoa! How can anybody make a decision
like that? That’s just—like I can’t understand that and I can’t understand how anybody
could rationalize like that, so I don’t even actually wanna go there—it’s like wow I don’t
even wanna know somebody that would even have remote thoughts like that. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 145
Ian appeared strongly opposed to the protestors or other detractors of the aquarium when he thought of the extreme possibility that they had poisoned the animals. The entire event seemed quite agitating for him to recall, and it seemed that he was more willing to take a somewhat more polarized “pro-aquarium” stance than some of the other aquarists, despite his own misgivings about the Aquarium’s working environment and management. He insisted he wanted to avoid any association with anyone who would consider doing such a heinous thing. He seemed to want to avoid engaging with protestors—perhaps employing an avoidance strategy like Lisa had— to defend against having to even think such awful thoughts.
The psychosocial dimensions of the aquarist work experience contain layers of complexity which may contribute to chronic stress associated with the work. Psychosocial risks are considered a particular form of workplace hazard which can result in work-related stress, but also burnout and depression (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, 2017; Lloyd &
Campion, 2017). Social isolation, moral distress, inefficient workspaces and resources, work overload, and the resultant cynicism and frustration may all contribute to the risk of burnout among aquarists at the Vancouver Aquarium (Angerer, 2003; de Carvalho et al., 2005; Figley &
Roop, 2006; Leggett et al., 2013; Lloyd & Campion, 2017; Stamm, 2010; Wagner, 2015).
Analysis Summary
We have now uncovered some of the many complexities and dilemmas aquarists must navigate and negotiate throughout their work. They encountered numerous stressors and difficulties, including feelings of ambivalence and disillusionment, frequent feelings of being overwhelmed, overworked, and underappreciated, experiences of moral distress and guilt, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 146
traumatic experiences and regular exposure to death and disease, and social stressors associated with the Aquarium’s ethicality.
The stressors and traumas the participants encountered, all while they bore major responsibility requiring vigilance and personal sacrifice, may result in significant risk of burnout.
In the interest of staying functional to do their caretaking work and enabling them to stay a part of the organization, the aquarists navigated and negotiated these challenging factors admirably, sometimes consciously and unconsciously employing various forms of defensiveness/defensive techniques—defense mechanisms, coping strategies and emotional management strategies as differentiated below.
Coping strategies appeared to include:
• the “tank check” as “ritualized task performance” and social coping strategy to
avoid errors that could result in animal death or illness,
• a focus on communication of prior or potential mistakes to all other new staff,
• explicit avoidance of engagement with potentially distressing topics and/or
distancing from a controversy or source of ambivalence, and
• avoidance of becoming attached to the animals.
Defense mechanisms appeared to include:
• the avoidance of naming the animals as a social defense mechanism functioning
to protect against the psychic pain of repeated loss, BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 147
• the use of jokes or humour to defend against psychological disequilibrium
resulting from disjunct between Aquarium’s marketing and the reality aquarists
know,
• having a “tough skin”: dissociation, detachment, distancing, and desensitization,
including the subsequent use of “sanitizing language” to reduce emotional impact
of psychically painful tasks such as having to kill fish,
• rationalization and/or moral rationalization of why collecting and captivity of
animals was justifiable to reduce anxiety and resist the possibility that the
aquarists’ behaviour violates their moral standards.
Emotional management strategies appeared to include:
• the use of perspectival selectivity to diminish guilt associated with collecting,
• “focusing on what you can do” to reduce frustration with the organization and its
management related to perceptions of hypocrisy and green-washing,
• the use of selective attention to abate ambivalence about morality of collecting
and keeping animals captive.
While these observations and differentiations are purely speculative, it would seem fair to describe that in many of the ways the aquarists responded to difficult or emotionally troubling work experiences—particularly experiences of moral distress—they seemed to employ different forms of defensiveness 45 . The purported conservation and education goals of the aquarium were
45 Defensiveness, or defensive techniques, form the broader category containing coping strategies and defense mechanisms, and other behaviours that are designed to reduce anxiety (Cramer, 2006, p. 10), under which I also include emotional management strategies as used by (Norgaard, 2006). BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 148
also woven throughout almost all of the interviews and seemed to provide an implicit endorsement of both displaying the animals at the aquarium, and the activities that were undertaken to do so. In a broader sense, we see that throughout the interviews, the participants often affirmed their enjoyment of and devotion to the work, often as attempts to “repair” the difficult experiences they were sharing with me.
The aquarists appeared to rely on their love of the work and the meaning they found in it as a source of resilience which could buoy them up when they experienced challenges, particularly as the “honeymoon” ended and they encountered difficulties in the job. At the same time, they expressed concerns that the organization was taking advantage of their devotion to their work, by denying resources, designing unnecessarily difficult work environments and paying poorly while assuming the aquarists would just make it work, somehow. These organizational conflicts seemed to lead to a pervasive sense of disconnection that influenced various aspects of the aquarists’ work, and in some cases their personal lives.
As we have uncovered, aquarists are performing demanding caretaking work in an organizational environment that seems unsympathetic to the full responsibility they carry, the traumas they may endure, and their needs for functional, efficient work spaces. Despite the number of frankly difficult topics we spoke about, it amazed me that the aquarists continued to devote themselves to the work, always pushing for things to be better. Their resilience seemed to stem from their fascination with the work itself and their interest in simply observing and being around animals. They described not only the pleasures of hand-feeding or otherwise taking care of the animals, but breeding nudibranchs and rare stingrays; observing fish behaviour; BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 149
contributing to conservation programs; educating visitors, family and friends; and the pleasurable pursuit of re-creating a more perfect, representative slice of the wild to share with the visitors. The aquarists seemed to hold out hope that the Aquarium could be better, that there always had been, and still was, untapped potential. They seemed ready to achieve more if they weren’t so weighed down by the additional strains of a dysfunctional organizational culture that they felt increasingly disconnected from. The forms of defensiveness they employed do appear to assist them in staying functional to continue their work. However, there is significant turnover among newer aquarists—those I did not interview—which may reflect that not all aquarists find effective ways to cope with the demands of the work, perhaps succumbing to the risks of burnout as illustrated here.
As we have now seen, the work experience of aquarists is indeed more nuanced and complicated than it might initially seem from an outside perspective. Their work intersects with many controversial dimensions, including animal welfare and environmental advocacy, while the demanding nature of caretaking work and challenges of the Aquarium’s organizational shortcomings take their toll. In the following section, we explore how the results of this research could inform changes to the aquarists’ work situation.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 150
Chapter 5: Discussion, Recommendations and Conclusion
The Aquarium’s apparent lack of understanding of the work challenges borne by the aquarists, and its subsequent inadequate recognition, appears to diminish the promise and dream of engaging those passionate and devoted aquarist staff fully in the deeply meaningful work the
Aquarium has to offer. Instead, they felt disconnected, jaded, and disillusioned about the
Aquarium. I suggest that is in the best interests of the Aquarium and wider industry entities, such as the AZA, 46 to consider the experiences of aquarists as an important component of their stated goals of providing a “gold standard” of animal care work at their institutions. As protestors and detractors continue to shine a light on the ethical questions surrounding zoos and aquariums, modern institutions like the Vancouver Aquarium should be continuously striving to make their workplaces friendlier to the animal care staff as part of supporting increasing animal welfare standards.
Reducing Burnout Risk
This research suggests that aquarists in a modern public aquarium like the Vancouver
Aquarium may suffer more from the effects of burnout than compassion fatigue. I believe the burnout is fuelled by chronic stressors present in the aquarists’ work environment, along with primary traumas in an individual’s own work experience and history. I suspect that the lack of the distraught human clientele in the aquarist animal care roles (thus, reducing secondary trauma as a regular occurrence) means that the current employee-assistance programs, available and constructed using the veterinary and shelter world’s understanding of compassion fatigue that is
46 Association of Zoos and Aquariums. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 151
very focused on the secondary trauma rife in their field of work, don’t quite fit or resonate for aquarists.
There is a need to support aquarist staff as they try to respond to the tensions and challenges unique to their work, first by acknowledging those tensions and challenges, and then by supporting the staff in the ways in which they’ve indicated they would like more support.
Ways in which staff seemed to desire more support include:
• a different distribution of financial resources (allocating more to animal care),
• acknowledging the animals as a high priority and demonstrating it through
institutional action, and
• by helping aquarists achieve long and satisfying careers, in which their wages and
professional development opportunities adequately reflected the challenges of the
work they do.
Aquarists, after all, are professionals in their field—a field which demands significant local knowledge, unique expertise and problem-solving skills, and which benefits from experience to avoid mistakes made by inexperienced staff.
Recommendations
I offer the following list of six recommendations to anyone interested in addressing the issues I have highlighted in the analysis. These recommendations are aimed at reducing both traumatic and chronically stressful experiences that could contribute to burnout, while building upon resilience and compassion satisfaction in the work experiences of the aquarists. These recommendations may also result in improved welfare for the animals. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 152
1. Recognize and acknowledge the aquarists by supporting their learning and
professional development, so they can continue to advance animal welfare, since they
are the best positioned to directly affect that. This also supports treating the aquarist
role as a career, not just a simple “stepping-stone” job.
2. Increase the aquarists’ wages. This would contribute to retention, reduce their overall
personal financial stress and sense of underappreciation, and may further reduce the
burnout risk of insufficient reward.
3. Support compassion satisfaction (“the pleasure you derive from being able to do your
work well”) projects: breeding projects, designing new experimental systems, or by
providing at minimum adequate, or even a slight surplus of staffing so that aquarists
have the ability to satisfy themselves with the quality of their caretaking. Compassion
satisfaction projects are a potent source of reward for the aquarists—they would
probably say they’re easy to make happy on that front!
4. Reduce work overload by building in efficiencies to centre design on aquarist needs,
since their needs are focused on providing a high quality of care for the animals in
their care. Meaningfully consulting the aquarists may serve to recognize and
acknowledge them too, reducing feelings of invisibility and loss of influence. It may
also address the burnout risk of high-demand low-control working environments.
Aquarists need access to exhibit and life support control to facilitate fine-tuning the
environment to the animals’ needs, thus enhancing animal welfare. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 153
5. Increase social support mechanisms by educating staff about signs of burnout and
encouraging rather than discouraging the discussion of the challenges of the work.
This could be group sessions led by someone who develops a workshop built around
a burnout lens more specific to aquarists than the currently dominant compassion-
fatigue lens. There needs to be more of a protocol in the institutional culture that
acknowledges the forms of trauma and loss that occur within the aquarist work
experience. Such programs or workshops could be offered as part of institutional
aquarist training protocols and could be offered through the AZA or RAW 47 at their
annual events.
6. Aquarists sometimes spoke about how it was hard to have a work-life balance—
support them in pursuing this by ensuring adequate staffing. This would change the
situation so that staying late isn’t inevitable, and neither is leaving feeling guilty or
worried.
Implications, Limitations and Future Directions
My hope is that by investigating and subsequently acknowledging the experience of aquarists, I may help others who work in the aquarium field to recognize themselves and their own experiences more clearly, providing a form of validation for some of the challenges inherent in the role of the aquarist. This validation could help support their ability to stay engaged in the industry and may also help senior management staff or staff in higher levels of accreditation organizations better understand the unique experiences of the dedicated animal professionals
47 Regional Aquarist Workshop: an annual meeting of aquarists and other aquarium industry professionals BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 154
who keep zoos and aquariums operational on their most basic level. My research could inform the development of aquarist-specific employee-assistance offerings and more sensitive and psychologically-appropriate education and training, in addition to directing aquarium management on how to provide more finely calibrated support for their staff. My research could also support effective pursuit of public aquarium conservation and education goals.
However, despite the recommendations I was able to develop as a result of my research—most of which are practical to implement via improved organizational Human
Relations practices—there remain contradictory aspects in the role of the aquarist which defy simple solutions. The transgression reflected in the aquarists’ removal of animals from the wild for the goal of helping people connect with the animals and their wild environment seemed especially difficult for them to navigate and may be intractable given the nature of the industry.
Even as the aquarium industry makes admirable, steady strides toward captive reproduction and sourcing of all the animals they display, difficult questions around the welfare of different species may remain, as we continue to learn more about their requirements and develop our empathy as a society toward non-human animals. The potential for public empathy to expand to non-cetacean animals held in aquariums, such as fish, amphibians and reptiles, may continue to challenge the ethicality of public aquariums in the future. Therefore, even without cetaceans on display at the Vancouver Aquarium, the aquarists could face continual stressors related to public scrutiny of their occupation and concern about the possibility of losing their jobs or, indeed, their entire industry. BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 155
Academic Contributions
My research also contributes to the fields of human-animal relations, caretaking and nursing research, sustainability and psychosocial studies. This work illuminates the complexity of human-animal relations in a new context and broadens current conceptions of the forms human-animal relationships may take. I was unable to find research that explored relationships between fish and their professional caretakers. I wondered if this gap might reflect societal assumptions that people don’t or shouldn’t get attached to fish—an assumption clear to those who know self-proclaimed vegetarians who are nevertheless comfortable eating fish. My research challenges this assumption by demonstrating that there are meaningful caretaking relationships—even as they might not show up in familiar forms such as naming— between aquarists and their charges. While the analysis did explore connection and the enjoyment of caretaking, what seemed more revealing were the defensive techniques the aquarists engaged in to manage the formation of these relationships and the potential for loss and grief that can result should they allow themselves to become deeply attached.
My research introduces a new occupational setting to the field of caretaking research by bringing the burnout and compassion fatigue lenses from the nursing and veterinary care worlds into the aquarium industry. I have also touched upon the fields of environmental sustainability and conservation in my research, particularly as we explored the guilt and moral distress that well-meaning, conservation-oriented people like the aquarists can experience as they do their work supporting their organization and implementing its goals. The acquisition of animals frequently appeared to result in experiences of moral distress or the activation of defense BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 156
mechanisms to manage the psychological disequilibrium of their activities. This suggests further areas for exploration around the cost of operating public aquariums from a moral and ethical perspective, and to the staff in particular. This area of contention is also reflected in the public scrutiny of the industry.
This research widens the realm of psychosocial studies and demonstrates the value of this lens in understanding workers’ experiences and professional quality of life. I have uncovered a previously unknown context for the operation of defensive techniques, particularly social defense systems. My research also suggests potential for further research around the relationship between coping strategies and defense mechanisms. I wondered at times if the participants’ defense mechanisms had become so rote that they had transitioned from unconscious defense mechanisms to conscious coping strategies. This was especially the case as it relates to the avoidance of attachment, which at times was explicitly articulated by the participants as a way of coping with experiences and anticipation of loss, and at other times seemed to take place on a more unconscious level, such as in the avoidance of naming the animals. Further, coping strategies sometimes appeared to become social in nature, such as with the use of the “tank check.” This is another facet of my research that may contribute to understandings of social defense theory, particularly in occupational settings.
Further research could expand to do cross-institutional studies, since I was only able to perform a small case study at a single site. The psychoanalytic methodology is labour intensive, and I was only able to try and understand a small number of aquarists in a single institution.
There were also challenges associated with the psychosocial method I employed. Not having a BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 157
background or professional training in exploring “beneath the surface” of what was said made it difficult for me to consistently look beyond what the participants were able to articulate. While some unconscious dynamics did seem to be obvious to me—for example, the use of rationalization to diminish guilt associated with collecting—others eluded me, especially when the participants were unequivocal about what they were sharing. This challenge may also be related to the dynamic between myself as the researcher and the participant because of our pre- existing collegial friendships. I may have been less likely to question or not take at “face value” what they were saying because of our previously established relationships which had never before existed in a psychoanalytic research framework.
However, by delving deeply into the aquarist experience, even that small number of participants allowed me to illuminate some of the issues that could be better explored across other institutions and in various different facets of animal care work via other methodologies as well. Future research could develop a professional quality of life scale similar to those used in nursing (Stamm, 2010).
Reflections
As I reflect on what it has meant to be working on this project, I consider whether I’ve satisfied the curiosity that compelled me to do this research. Indeed, I now have a much deeper understanding of the complexities and stressors that comprise the everyday work of aquarists and how the aquarists I interviewed navigate and negotiate this challenging work landscape.
My aim was to provide an honest look at the work experiences of the aquarist for the purpose of improving those experiences. It was not my desire to comment on the debate about BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 158
whether animals should be kept in captivity. I had an overarching goal of being an advocate for the aquarists, who shared that in different ways they felt no one was advocating for the animals or themselves. I miss being an aquarist, and I feel strongly that animals in captivity deserve to have engaged and experienced aquarists with access to adequate resources attending to their needs. The aquarists also need an improved organizational culture that addresses the systemic sources of stress where possible.
I also benefitted personally from this project due to the immersion in understanding more about the aquarist work experience resulting from spending long stretches of time reading the interview transcripts and constructing the analysis. I found myself investigating the experience of aquarists in pursuit of better understanding my own experience, and I do sense I have a better grasp on why I felt conflicted and stressed over aspects of the work, and why I struggled to process traumatic events and incidents.
I am deeply grateful to the aquarists for participating in this shared exploration of the aquarist work experience, and I treasure the time we spent over the years as colleagues and, more recently, as researcher and participant. Given the opportunity, I firmly believe the aquarists can do amazing things, and it is my sincere hope that this project illuminates some of the complexity of the crucial but little-known work experience of the aquarist at the Vancouver Aquarium.
BEYOND LIVING THE DREAM 159
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